Shell - Navigate up 'n' directories

I often find myself doing commands like this

cd ../../../../../

Is there a shortcut I can use that will cd ../ n times?

No, there is no existing command for this, but it is trivial to write one. Add these lines to your ~/.bashrc file (thanks to D. Ben Knoble for pointing out that the variable should be local):

function ncd(){
  local path=""
  for ((i=1;i<=$1;i++)); do
    path="../$path"
  done
  echo "Moving to $path" >&2
  cd "$path"
}

Save the file, open a new terminal, and you can now move N directories up using ncd N. For example:

$ pwd
/home/terdon/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/dir7/dir8/dir9
$ ncd 5
Moving to ../../../../../
$ pwd
/home/terdon/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4
$ ncd 2
Moving to ../../
$ pwd
/home/terdon/dir1/dir2

You can easily create aliases or shell functions to perform the given task. I personally use these:

alias ..='cd ..'
alias ...='cd ../..'
alias ....='cd ../../..'

and so on, manually defined for up to many-many dots in my .bashrc.

A shell function could instead easily take a numeric parameter, and execute cd .. in a loop that many times.

Coming from the Windows world, Alt + Up Arrow navigates to the parent directory in Windows Explorer. So I made something like this in ~/.inputrc:

"\33\33[A": "cd ..\n"

then pressing Alt + Up Arrow moves to the parent directory in the terminal. You have to press multiple times of course to move higher, but I have found it to be very fast. Also you can change the shortcut to your liking.

Shell - Navigate up 'n' directories

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