Why does the wildcard * not work when changing directories?

Assuming all the possible target directories are under /home and there's no newline characters in directory names, you might use this shell function:

cds() { cd "$(find /home -type d -name "$1" | head -n 1)" } $ cds thedirectoryiwanttogointo 

Of course, depending on how many subdirectories and files are under /home and the ability for your OS to cache all the tree in memory or not, performance will vary significantly.

On GNU systems, you can speed it up and make it more reliable wrt newline characters in file names by using this syntax instead:

cds() { cd "$(find /home -type d -name "$1" -print -quit)" } 

That will stop searching as soon as the first match is found.

Note that the argument is taken as a pattern, so you can do:

cds 'foo*bar' 

for instance to cd into the first directory (the order is not specified) whose name starts with foo and ends in bar.

You want wildcard expansion to find a path anywhere on the system. You can do that, if you specify the pattern correctly:

cd /**/thedirectoryiwanttogointo 

will work in zsh and fish by default, in Bash if you first shopt -s globstar, in tcsh if you set globstar, in ksh93 if you set -o globstar, in yash if you set -o extended-glob.

This works because the wildcard is used within an absolute path starting with / instead of being relative to the current directory, and when you opt into using the ** pattern it expands to any number of subdirectories.

While this will work, it is likely to take an extremely long time. Your shell has to search your entire system for the matching file(s). You can cut that down by providing a longer prefix to trim out more of the search space:

cd /home/pulsar/**/thedirectoryiwanttogointo/ 

The further you drill down the less searching there will be to do. If the directory tree is fairly sparse, this won't take too long and is actually practical to use. The trailing / ensures that the expansion is only to a directory, which removes one variety of ambiguity that could occur.

If there's more than one match still, the result will depend on your shell. Bash and fish will switch to the alphabetically first match, ignoring the ambiguity. tcsh and yash will report an error. zsh and ksh will interpret it as an attempt to use one of their advanced directory-switching features and probably report an error.

If you're likely to use the same directory repeatedly, either putting the parent into CDPATH or creating a shell variable $FOO you can use in place of the long path is a better option. You can combine the shell variable with ** expansion to save more typing if you're using it often.

If you're always going to the same deep directory, one simple solution is to just create a symlink to it:

ln -s ~/foo/bar/baz/quux/etc/etc/etc/target ~/shortcut 

If you've gone to the directory before, another solution is to search your command history for the name you want; press ctrl-R and the characters to search for. This is bash-specific, but I imagine most modern shells have a similar facility.