The "cd-after-exit" Feature == Abstract This document explains the troublesome implementation of the "cd-after-exit" feature. == Specification When the feature is enabled, ranger will attempt to change the directory of the parent shell (from which ranger is run) to the last visited directory when ranger is exited. This task is, by its nature, shell dependent. As a bash or zsh user, I focused on the implementation for those two shells and left the addition of support for csh, ksh, and other shells to those who actually use those shells. == What's the problem? Shells have several limitations, the implementation could not be done easily because: 1. It is not possible to use something like system('cd xyz') at the end. This command would run in a new shell and wouldn't change the directory of the parent shell at all. 2. Using exec('cd xyz') is not possible either, since 'cd' is a command which is directly integrated in to the shell and can not be run this way. == Redirection of streams The only way I found is using cd `program` from inside the shell to change the directory to whatever `program` prints to the stdout: bash$ cd `echo ..` Since the user interface still has to be printed, we simply redirect it to the stderr. It is not sufficient however to change sys.stdout to sys.stderr, since curses seems not to be aware of sys.stdout and continues to print out the interface to the actual stdout. So what I did was swap the stdout and stderr of the whole ranger process on the shell command line by using: bash$ cd `ranger 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3 3>&-` Since errors are now printed to the stdout, we have do this in ranger: sys.stderr = sys.__stdout__ And at the end, write the current directory to the stdout, which is now reachable via sys.__stderr__ due to the redirections: sys.__stderr__.write(last_visited_directory) To inform the ranger process about these changes, we add a --cd-after-exit switch which: bash$ cd `ranger --cd-after-exit 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3 3>&-` == Argument passing This works well enough, but there are two remaining problems: 1. How to pass arguments to ranger? 2. How to memorize that line? Although you can just copy+paste it into your bashrc and create an alias, the complexity of the line could lead to errors. Both problems are solved by putting the command in a file: run.sh: cd "`ranger --cd-after-exit \"$@\" 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3 3>&-`" The $@ is responsible for argument passing. By using the source command, the file will be evaluated without creating a distinct new shell. bash$ source run.sh arg1 ... argN To add flexibility, replace the name "ranger" in the command to the first argument. Now it requires you to pass the name of the ranger command to the script as the first argument: run.sh: RANGER="$1" shift cd "`$RANGER --cd-after-exit \"$@\" 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3 3>&-`" == Put it in a nutshell I didn't want to have 2 files for the main program and wanted just one file at /usr/bin/ranger. So I used this trick to merge both files into one: #!/usr/bin/python """": """ If you run this file with python, or simply by typing ranger, the program will run normally. If you, however, run this file by sourcing it into the shell, like you did with run.sh, the cd-after-exit mode will be activated. Now the way of running ranger with the cd-after-exit feature is: bash$ source /path/to/ranger.py /path/to/ranger.py or, if properly installed: bash$ source ranger ranger == Open issues Unfortunately there is some redundancy: you have to type the path to ranger twice. I know of no way to fix this, because it is not possible to get the filename of the file currently being sourced. Example: bash$ echo 'source sourced.sh' > main.sh bash$ echo 'echo $0 $@' > sourced.sh bash$ bash main.sh main.sh If you find a way to make this print out 'sourced.sh', let me know. :) Dec 25, 2009