get back to the previous location after 'cd' command?

Question

I'm writing a shell script that needs to cd to some location. Is there any way to get back to the previous location, that is, the location before cd was executed?

Answer 1

You can simply do

cd -

that will take you back to your previous location.

Some shells let you use pushdir/popdir commands, check out this site. You may also find this SO question useful.

Answer 2

If you're running inside a script, you can also run part of the script inside a sub-process, which will have a private value of $PWD.

# do some work in the base directory, eg. echoing $PWD
echo $PWD

# Run some other command inside subshell
( cd ./new_directory; echo $PWD )

# You are back in the original directory here:
echo $PWD

This has its advantages and disadvantages... it does isolate the directory nicely, but spawning sub-processes may be expensive if you're doing it a lot. ( EDIT: as @Norman Gray points out below, the performance penalty of spawning the sub-process probably isn't very expensive relative to whatever else is happening in the rest of the script )

For the sake of maintainability, I typically use this approach unless I can prove that the script is running slowly because of it.