How to make perl affect my shell

[jatill]

I want to run a perl script that takes an argument. When the script is finished, I want to be in a different directory than I started. Is that possible? I'm willing to use any additional unix toys such as aliases or shell scripts if necessary.

[Hue-Bond]

Yes, but not in the same shell process that you "came from". Your Perl script would need to spawn another shell after chdir'ing to the new directory. You could also have a modified environment if you wanted to.

[jatill]

Looks like I found an answer to my own question. I just needed to set up my alias with a \!^ to pass along the param to perl. ex: alias warp 'cd `warp.pl \!^`' and then have the perl script print out the destination directory.

[samizdat]

If you have your program exec a new shell, you will end up there.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict; #  idiot
use warnings; # pruf

chdir '/home/dwilde';
exec '/usr/local/bin/bash';

As has been pointed out, you will be in a #new# shell.

[zigdon]

The way I've done it is I have an alias in the shell that sources a file that's created by the perl script:

apocalypse$ which c
c is an alias for . ~/bin/mychdir

$ cat ~/bin/mychdir
#
~/bin/finddir $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 $7 $8 $9
cd "`cat $HOME/.targetdir`"

The benefit is that it stays within the same shell, which means my history and background jobs are all still there.