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So everytime I change the directory I would like the new path to automatically get listed with ls.
There are solutions if the path gets changed using cd but I never found a solution that would work when the path gets changed using the autocd option.

Would be quite convenient, has anyone achieved that before?

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1 Answer 1

up vote 4 down vote accepted

You can achieve this by changing the variable PROMPT_COMMAND, which is executed before PS1, e.g.:


This will list each time you get a new prompt. Of course you only want to execute ls if the directory has changed:

PROMPT_COMMAND='[[ $my_currdir != $PWD ]] && ls; my_currdir=$PWD'

This checks if the new directory isn't the same as the last one set, and then executes ls, after which your current directory is stored in my_currdir

I found an even better line here, where they use bash as a file manager:

PROMPT_COMMAND='[[ ${__new_wd:=$PWD} != $PWD ]] && list; __new_wd=$PWD'

since it is possible that __new_wd is unset, you can assign a default value which will be used in that case (see bash man pages, search for :=)

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