The Bash Portal Gun is a collection of bash scripts that is supposed to simplify jumping between directories and moving files between directories using multiple different shells.
It allows you to open portals in two different directories, and then to jump
or to move files between these two directories using the portals, without
having to type long paths as arguments to mv or cd.
$ pOrange <relativePath>creates an orange portal$ pBlue <relativePath>creates a blue portal$ pWhereshows current positions of portals$ pClosecloses both portals$ pDestroyfinds and removes "zombie portals" (broken symlinks that arise whenever you move the containing directories)
Suppose you have two terminals open.
In the first terminal, you cd to a directory a:
in_terminal_A $ cd /home/me/very/long/path/aIn the second terminal, you cd to another directory b:
in_terminal_B $ cd /home/me/another/very/long/path/bNow you want to move file f from a to b.
Usually, you would have to type something like:
in_terminal_B $ mv f /home/me/very/long/path/a/If you are selectively moving multiple files from a to b, this
quickly becomes annoying. Bash Portal Gun to the rescue!
in_terminal_A $ pBlue # creates a blue portal in the directory `a`
in_terminal_B $ pOrange # creates an orange portal in `b`
in_terminal_B $ mv stuff \[orange\] # push stuff through the portal
in_terminal_B $ cd \[orange\] # go through the portal yourself
in_terminal_B $ pClose # close all portalsNow you are with all your files in the directory a.
Notice that you usually only have to type 'pB' 'pO' 'pC' and '[', and then press tab. There is a possibility to modify your shell prompt so that it shows the portals that are open in the current directory.
Installation is simple: clone the whole repository (or download bashPortalGun as .zip
and unpack it somewhere).
Then cd to the bashPortalGun directory.
In the most cases, it should be enough to run
$ ./installBashPortalGunThis script will add the bashPortalGun scripts to your PATH,
and modify your shell prompt in the ~/.bashrc.
It will also modify the behavior of cd such that it handles
symlinks slightly differently (make sure you want this, remove
the alias otherwise).
Since the installation script modifies your ~/.bashrc, it
creates a backup copy: remove this copy after the installation, if
you think that everything went smoothly.
If something goes wrong, restore you original .bashrc as follows:
$ mv ~/.bashrc_BACKUP_BY_BASH_PORTAL_GUN ~/.bashrcYou can also take a look at the installation script, and run only those steps that you really want. It has only a few lines, and is really straight forward.
Please notice that each time you use the scripts, they create a
file ~/.state.portal in your home directory.
Take a few minutes to walk through the test chambers to learn the basic
usage and caveats (cd to chamber_n, then cat instructions.txt).
These scripts obviously do not share any code or other data with the "Portal" game (Valve) or the portal-plugin for Vim (however, we have decided to follow the same color convention). Use at your own risk.