Hari's Technical Space

If you are frequently performing cd to subdirectories of a specific parent
directory, you can set the CDPATH to the parent directory and perform
cd to the subdirectories without giving the parent directory path as
explained below.

# pwd
/home/ramesh
# cd mail
-bash: cd: mail: No such file or directory

[Note: The above cd is looking for mail directory under
current directory]

# export CDPATH=/etc
# cd mail
/etc/mail

[Note: The above cd is looking for mail under /etc and not
under current directory]

# pwd
/etc/mail

To make this change permanent, add

export CDPATH=/etc  to your ~/.bash_profile

Similar to the PATH variable, you can add more than one directory entry
in the CDPATH variable, separating them with : , as shown below.

export CDPATH=.:~:/etc:/var

This hack can be very helpful under the following situations:
• Oracle DBAs frequently working under $ORACLE_HOME, can set
the CDPATH variable to the oracle home
• Unix sysadmins frequently working under /etc, can set the
CDPATH variable to /etc
• Developers frequently working under project directory
/home/projects, can set the CDPATH variable to /home/projects
• End-users frequently accessing the subdirectories under their
home directory, can set the CDPATH variable to ~ (home
directory)