Convoluted title, eh? After many years of intermittently being miffed when I couldn’t just type cd /NameofAlias and have the bash shell transport me into the directory the alias pointed to, I finally decided to do something about it.

First stop: Mac OS X Hints, where I looked at these two hints:
Enable ‘cd’ into directory aliases from the Terminal
A script to reveal alias paths in the Terminal

From the insight gained there, I cobbled together my one-step solution to the problem…

I wanted to be able to do this on any Mac i encounter without having to install anything additional. So I simply added the below code to my .bash_profile

# teach shell to treat aliases like symbolic links rather than files
function cd {
	if [ ${#1} == 0 ]; then
		builtin cd
	elif [[ -d "${1}" || -L "${1}" ]]; then	# regular link or directory
		builtin cd "${1}"
	elif [ -f "${1}" ]; then	# file: is it an alias?
		# Redirect stderr to dev null to suppress OSA environment errors
		exec 6>&2 # Link file descriptor 6 with stderr so we can restore stderr later
		exec 2>/dev/null # stderr replaced by /dev/null
		path=$(osascript << EOF
tell application "Finder"
set theItem to (POSIX file "${1}") as alias
if the kind of theItem is "alias" then
get the posix path of ((original item of theItem) as text)
end if
end tell
EOF
)
		exec 2>&6 6>&-      # Restore stderr and close file descriptor #6.

		if [ "$path" == '' ];then # probably not an alias, but regular file
			builtin cd "${1}"	# will trigger regular shell error about cd to regular file
		else	# is alias, so use the returned path of the alias
			builtin cd "$path"
		fi
	else	# should never get here, but just in case.
		builtin cd "${1}"
	fi

}

I put this in my .bash_profile, which I have checked in to a CVS repository. Then, from any Mac that I am working on, I simply check out my bash environment and either source it or overwrite the current .bash_profile. This gives me instant access from anywhere to all the modification I make to my bash environment.

Once it’s been loaded in your .bash_profile, any time you start a new session, the built-in ‘cd’ function has been replaced with the above. You should be able to use it just as before, the only exception being that now aliases will resolve as well as symlinks and regular directories.

Thanks to the original authors and developers of the hint(s) this is based on. I hope someone finds this useful.

NOTES:
1) Unfortunately, using it at first was triggering these messages:
CFLog (21): dyld returns 2 when trying to load /Library/ScriptingAdditions/QXPScriptingAdditions.osax/Contents/MacOS/QXPScriptingAdditions

so that’s why I had to supress the errors.

2) I have only tested this on 10.4.x