As a web developer, I find myself navigating around in the terminal most of my time. The most frequent combination of commands I usually run are cd immediately followed by an ls. After a bit of Googling, I found a way to do this automatically in Ubuntu at home and OSX at work by adding a couple of lines to my .bashrc (.bash_profile for OSX).

function cs()
{
  if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    cd && ls
  else
    cd "$*" && ls
  fi
}
alias cd='cs'

Easy. All it does is create a function cs() that will call the standard cd command with any arguments passed into it. Once the directory is changed, it will list the directory contents with an ls. The default behavior of cd is replaced using alias.

Update 05-01-2012: I noticed that this disables the default behavior of cd going to the home directory when no arguments are passed. There is probably a much more clever way to handle this, but the above code now handles that.

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