I would like there to be an adverbial version of "cd", which takes a path followed by a command and optional arguments and executes the command with its working directory set to the given path. Its invocation would be similar to chroot(8), that is:
chdir [OPTION] NEWDIR [COMMAND [ARG]...] This would allow these two commands to be synonyms aside from a different arrangement of processes: (cd /foo && ls -l) chdir /foo ls -l Why do I want this when there's a perfectly good shell builtin? Well, I often find that I want to write programs that take an argument list and run them in various different contexts, for example in a chroot (using "chroot") or in a container (using "lxc exec"). Unless the context-entering command has an option to set the current directory - neither of the two aforementioned examples does - I have to do this by writing something along the lines of: sudo chroot /path/to/chroot sh -c 'cd /foo && ls -l' This means dealing with shell quoting, which is tedious and error-prone. It would be much easier if I had something that composed nicely with other programs that use this kind of pattern for running a child process in some different context: sudo chroot /path/to/chroot chdir /foo ls -l If people think this is a reasonable idea then I'd be happy to write the code, although I'd have to faff around with getting my employer to sign a copyright assignment. I'm aware that (as far as I know) this is an innovation rather than something that other operating systems already implement; I think my suggested name is the most natural choice by analogy with the system call and chroot(8). Thanks, -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org]
