What is the 'bash: cd: too many arguments' error?

04/17/2017 • 2 minute read

This question popped up on StackOverflow last night and I thought it was interesting that cd initially looks like it doesn’t behave like ls in regards to pattern matching, even though they are both builtins.

The person was using cd album* to move into the first directory out of a set of album-0{1..2} directories.

This stopped working with an upgrade to Ubuntu 17.04 (and subsequently Bash-4.4-RC1) and instead threw this error:

bash: cd: too many arguments

I would never personally rely on this matching behavior, but it is interesting that it is saying cd is having an issue with multiple arguments as the Bash manual’s cd section even says that:

Any additional arguments following directory are ignored.

What changed?

Looking through the Bash Source Code, I noticed one interesting commit that added the following to config-top.h:

/* Define CD_COMPLAINS if you want the non-standard, but sometimes-desired
   error messages about multiple directory arguments to `cd'. */

#define CD_COMPLAINS

And the specific error message from the question is mentioned in builtins/cd.def:

#if defined (CD_COMPLAINS)
  else if (list->next)
    {
      builtin_error (_("too many arguments"));
      return (EXECUTION_FAILURE);
    }
#endif

Proving it

Bash 4.4 Beta where it still works:

#Pulling and unpacking source
$ wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/bash-4.4-beta.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf bash-4.4-beta.tar.gz
$ cd bash-4.4-beta

#Building, go grab something to drink. It's gonna be a while.
~/bash-4.4-beta$ ./configure
~/bash-4.4-beta$ make

#Check Version
~/bash-4.4-beta$ ./bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.4.0(1)-beta (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)

#Enter a clean interactive prompt
~/bash-4.4-beta$ env -i PATH="$PWD:$PATH" ./bash --noprofile --norc

#Test example
bash-4.4$ mkdir album-0{1..2}
bash-4.4$ cd album* && pwd
/home/gkent/bash-4.4-beta/album0-1

Bash 4.4 Stable Release where it doesn’t work:

#Pulling and unpacking source
$ wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/bash-4.4.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf bash-4.4.tar.gz
$ cd bash-4.4/

#Building, go grab something to drink. It's gonna be a while.
~/bash-4.4$ ./configure
~/bash-4.4$ make

#Check Version
~/bash-4.4$ ./bash -version
GNU bash, version 4.4.0(1)-release (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)

#Enter a clean interactive prompt
~/bash-4.4$ env -i PATH="$PWD:$PATH" ./bash --noprofile --norc

#Test example
bash-4.4$ mkdir album-0{1..2}
bash-4.4$ cd album*
bash: cd: too many arguments

So what now?

It seems that the implementation of cd and the documentation of it got off somewhere along the way. A bug report was filed from that thread, so we will see the response on that. If you truly depend on this pattern matching functionality, then you could build your own Bash and remove the CD_COMPLAINS or override the command like Byte Commander suggested:

cd(){ builtin cd "${@:1:1}"; }

But that comes with its own issue of remembering to unset that if you need to test the real cd. Finally, you could go out of your way and make a working function alias out of something like this:

cd "$(find $1* | head -1)"

What is the 'bash: cd: too many arguments' error?

What changed?

Proving it

So what now?

Email