Hack 6. Use “shopt -s cdspell” to automatically correct mistyped directory names on cd

by Ramesh

Use shopt -s cdspell to correct the typos in the cd command automatically as shown below. If you are not good at typing and make lot of mistakes, this will be very helpful.

# cd /etc/mall
-bash: cd: /etc/mall: No such file or directory

# shopt -s cdspell

# cd /etc/mall

# pwd
/etc/mail

[Note: By mistake, when I typed mall instead of mail,
          cd corrected it automatically]

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Sathish January 26, 2011 at 12:33 am: very useful.
But I think the scope of “shopt -s cdspell” command is in the current terminal only.
How can i set it permanently so that whenever i login it will correct my typo error.

Thanks,
Sathish.
2 Abhinav Chittora February 27, 2012 at 2:05 am: @Sathish, you can make “shopt -s cdspell” command permanent using adding this line to your bash_profile file. You bash_profile is located in your home directory.

$vi ~/.bash_profile
shopt -s cdspell

Save the file. You need to log out once and login again to make it permanent. After this, you need not to type this command for each terminal.