cd - to go back to the previous
directory. My everyday computer is Windows 11 and I was longing to have that ability. I went back to an old tool called
DOSKEY that was originally released in 1991 with MS-DOS 5. It's still
around 33 years later (as of this writing).One of doskey’s features is macros. They are roughly equivalent to aliases in *nix. Here's how I made something
close to
cd - work:- Edit your registry to set a program to auto-run whenver you open a cmd.exe shell. Do this by adding a new
String value
to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor called Autorun. Put your program in as the
Value data. In my example, I use "C:\Batch\cmd.cmd"
-
I have a line in that file:
doskey /macrofile=c:\batch\doskey.macros -
In the doskey.macros file, I have the following contents:
cd = set OLDPWD=%CD% & cd $*
cd- = set OLDPWD=%CD% & cd %OLDPWD%
It's not exactly equivalent to cd - ,
but pretty close... just leave out the space between cd and -. Note that if you change directories without using cd
and a space, for example by using the chdir command or by using cd.. (with no space), it will break the
cd- hack.
