¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Sometimes I need to do random experimentation in a throwaway directory.

For that, I have the following cdtmp function in my shell:

cdtmp () {
	builtin cd "$(mktemp -d "/tmp/$USER-${1:+$1-}$(date +%Y-%m-%d)-XXXXXX")" || return
	builtin pwd
}

Here are two example usages:

% cdtmp
/tmp/thiago-2024-10-07-V3c3Na
thiago@thiagoperrotta-MacBook-Pro /tmp/thiago-2024-10-07-V3c3Na
% cdtmp devops
/tmp/thiago-devops-2024-10-07-P4W1fh

This idea was built upon Alex Kotliarskyi’s, which he describes as:

It’s a super simple alias that creates a temporary directory and then jumps into it. Here are a few examples of what I use it for:

— Clone a random interesting git repo to experiment with

I also use it for testing one-off bash, C++, golang or python scripts, for example:

% cdtmp
/tmp/thiago-2024-10-07-F5aFrJ
thiago@thiagoperrotta-MacBook-Pro /tmp/thiago-2024-10-07-F5aFrJ
% vim main.sh
thiago@thiagoperrotta-MacBook-Pro /tmp/thiago-2024-10-07-F5aFrJ
% bash main.sh
hello world

The function definition in my dotfiles.