One of the most important traits of being a SysAdmin is laziness (well, not really laziness, but recognizing repetitive action and taking steps to automate it). In the effort to combat repetitive changing directories, I have written a tiny (< 100 lines) Ruby script to handle “zooming” to a particular directory.

Firstly, download the script here and put it somewhere in your path (rename it to “zg.rb”). Make sure to chmod +x it so it’s executable.

Note, 3 of the lines in the script *MAY* need to be changed, they are:

$DFDIR = "/Users/hinmanm/.zg"
$ZGCONF = $DFDIR + "/zg.conf"
$FINDCMD = "find"

Change the DFDIR entry to be where you plan on storing your ZoomGo files. Make sure you create the directory you specified, as you can see about, mine is set to ~/.zg. You shouldn’t have to change the ZGCONF file unless you want to. The FINDCMD variable is because on FreeBSD, when you install the “findutils” package, the find command is “gfind”, so change this to whatever your find command is (‘find’ should be fine for most people).

In the ~/.zg/zg.conf file (or wherever your DFDIR and ZGCONF locations are), entries are specified with a directory name, rescan time and directory name glob. The entries in my ~/.zg/zg.conf file are:

~/src:10:*
~/pcap:10:*
~/hex:10:*
~/Torrents:30:*
~/Random:60:*
~/Pictures:10:*
/Volumes/VAULT:20:*

What this means is: “look at my ~/src directory, rescan it if it’s older than 10 minutes and search for all directories (*)“, etc. I also search my pcap directory, the hex source tree directory, my Torrents and Random files and my TrueCrypt vault drive (When it’s mounted).

Next, I added the following line to my ~/.zshrc (I use ZSH, but the syntax for Bash would be almost exactly the same):

## For the "ZoomGo" ruby file
function zg () {
eval cd `zg.rb $1`
}

Yea, it’s kind of a hackish way to do it, but it works. After starting a new zsh, you should now be able to type “zg <dirname>” to use ZoomGo on a directory. For example:

~$ zg aimsnarf
Zooming directly to /Users/hinmanm/src/ruby/aimsnarf...
~/src/ruby/aimsnarf$

When you first run ZoomGo, it will rescan all the directories that you specified in the zg.conf file, saving the datafiles in the DFDIR. If the data file hasn’t been updated in the given rescan time (like 10 minutes for my ~/src directory) it will also rescan the directory and you’ll see messages like this:

rescanning ~/src...
rescanning ~/pcap...
rescanning ~/hex...
… and so on

You can also manually rescan all the directories by adding the “–rescan” flag.

Now, let’s say you have 2 directories that are both named the same thing, here’s an example when I run “zg aim”

~$ zg aim
2 directories were returned.
(1)    /Users/hinmanm/pcap/aim
(2)    /Volumes/VAULT/pcap/aim
1
~/pcap/aim$

See that? ZoomGo asks you to choose which directory to zoom to if there is more than 1 option, at the moment, it doesn’t like more than 9 directories, but hopefully I’ll fix that later

There, wasn’t that easier than typing “cd ~/pcap/aim”, now try it for a longer directory:

~$ zg nsm-console
2 directories were returned.
(1)    /Users/hinmanm/hex/hex/rawpacket-root/usr/home/analyzt/rp-NSM/nsm-console
(2)    /Users/hinmanm/hex/hex2/rawpacket-root/usr/home/analyzt/rp-NSM/nsm-console
2
~/hex/hex2/rawpacket-root/usr/home/analyzt/rp-NSM/nsm-console$

Enjoy