One of the most used shell commands is cd. A quick survey among my friends revealed that between 10 and 20% of all commands they type are actually cd commands! Unfortunately, jumping from one part of your system to another with cd requires to enter almost the full path, which isn't very practical and requires a lot of keystrokes.

autojump is a faster way to navigate your filesystem. It works by maintaining a database of the directories you use the most from the command line. The jumpstat command shows you the current contents of the database. You need to work a little bit before the database becomes usable. Once your database is reasonably complete, you can "jump" to a commonly "cd"ed directory by typing:

j dirspec

where dirspec is a few characters of the directory you want to jump to. It will jump to the most used directory whose name matches the pattern given in dirspec. Note that autojump isn't meant to be a drop-in replacement for cd, but rather a complement. Cd is fine when staying in the same area of the filesystem; autojump is there to help when you need to jump far away from your current location.

Autojump supports tab completion. Try it! Autojump should be compatible with bash 4. Please report any problems!

Pierre Gueth contributed a very nice applet for freedesktop desktops (Gnome/KDE/...). It is called "jumpapplet", try it!

Thanks to Simon Marache-Francisco's outstanding work, autojump now works perfectly with zsh.

j mp3

could jump to /home/gwb/my mp3 collection, if that is the directory in which you keep your mp3s. :

jumpstat

will print out something in the lines of:

...
54.5:  /home/shared/musique
60.0:  /home/joel/workspace/coolstuff/glandu
83.0:  /home/joel/workspace/abs_user/autojump
96.9:  /home/joel/workspace/autojump
141.8: /home/joel/workspace/vv
161.7: /home/joel
Total key weight: 1077

The "key weight" reflects the amount of time you spend in a directory.

Joel Schaerer (joel.schaerer (at) laposte.net) Autojump applet written by Pierre Gueth Zsh support: Simon Marache-Francisco Install script written by Daniel Jackoway and others.

autojump is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

autojump is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with autojump. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

run:

./install.sh 

or:

./install.zsh

depending on your shell. Enter your root password if it asks.

Add the line:

source /etc/profile

to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc if it isn't already there.

If the script fails, you may need to do:

chmod +x install.(z)sh

before the first step.

Manual installation of autojump is very simple: copy

• autojump to /usr/bin,
• autojump.sh to /etc/profile.d,
• autojump.1 to /usr/share/man/man1.

Make sure to source /etc/profile in your .bashrc or .zshrc :

source /etc/profile

For now gcarrier and I have packaged autojump for Arch Linux. It is available in [community]. To install, type:

pacman -S autojump

Tanguy Ortolo packaged autojump for Debian testing/unstable. It will eventually reach Ubuntu. To install, type:

apt-get install autojump

I would be very interested by packages for other distros. If you think you can help me with the packaging, please contact me!

To completely remove autojump you should remove these files:

/etc/profile.d/autojump.bash

/etc/profile.d/autojump.sh

/etc/profile.d/autojump.zsh

/usr/bin/autojump

/usr/bin/jumpapplet

/usr/share/autojump/icon.png

/usr/share/autojump/

/usr/share/man/man1/autojump.1

Remove any mention of autojump in your .bashrc or .zshrc, then in currently running shells do:source /etc/profile.

If you keep getting autojump: command not found at the Bash prompt, do:unset PROMPT_COMMAND. You can also restart your shell.