One command to create and change directory

Question

I'm searching for just one command — nothing with && or | — that creates a directory and then immediately changes your current directory to the newly-created directory. (This is a question someone got for his exams of "linux-usage", he made a new command that did that, but that didn't give him the points.) This is on a debian server if that matters.

Answer 1

I believe you are looking for this:

mkdir project1 && cd "$_" 

Answer 2

define a bash function for that purpose in your $HOME/.bashrc e.g.

 function mkdcd () {      mkdir "$1" && cd "$1"  } 

then type mkdcd foodir in your interactive shell

^{So stricto sensu, what you want to achieve is impossible without a shell function containing some && (or at least a ; ) ... In other words, the purpose of the exercise was to make you understand why functions (or aliases) are useful in a shell....}

PS it should be a function, not a script (if it was a script, the cd would affect only the [sub-] shell running the script, not the interactive parent shell); it is impossible to make a single command or executable (not a shell function) which would change the directory of the invoking interactive parent shell (because each process has its own current directory, and you can only change the current directory of your own process, not of the invoking shell process).

PPS. In Posix shells you should remove the functionkeyword, and have the first line be mkdcd() {