bash - how to pipe result from the which command to cd

Question

How could I pipe the result from a which command to cd?

This is what I am trying to do:

which oracle | cd cd < which oracle 

But none of them works.

Is there a way to achieve this (rather than copy/paste of course)?

Edit : on second thought, this command would fail, because the destination file is NOT a folder/directory.

So I am thinking and working out a better way to get rid of the trailing "/oracle" part now (sed or awk, or even Perl) :)

Edit : Okay that's what I've got in the end:

cd `which oracle | sed 's/\/oracle//g'` 

Answer 1

You use pipe in cases where the command expects parameters from the standard input. ( More on this ).

With cd command that is not the case. The directory is the command argument. In such case, you can use command substitution. Use backticks or $(...) to evaluate the command, store it into variable..

path=`which oracle` echo $path # just for debug cd $path 

although it can be done in a much simpler way:

cd `which oracle`  

or if your path has special characters

cd "`which oracle`" 

or

cd $(which oracle) 

which is equivalent to backtick notation, but is recommended (backticks can be confused with apostrophes)

.. but it looks like you want:

cd $(dirname $(which oracle)) 

(which shows you that you can use nesting easily)

$(...) (as well as backticks) work also in double-quoted strings, which helps when the result may eventually contain spaces..

cd "$(dirname "$(which oracle)")" 

(Note that both outputs require a set of double quotes.)