I liked the spwd idea and ended up adjusting it to be a bit more precise. I just did some more testing with it to make sure it handled complicated directories without choking (though if they embed control chars, I don't filter them out... )... But rather than just looking at the number of dirs and displaying the whole path if <=3 elements or ..., like the current one does -- this one uses a progressive shortening, based on the length of the directory names. It aims to keep the total length down to 1/2 the # columns (so 40 on a standard screen)... Despite my many manipulations of the path, It works with dir paths like: dp> ll total 0 drwxrwsr-x 2 6 Jul 1 13:42 ^ difficult dir(to) "parse" ['correctly'], *{maybe}? ~; or #not/ drwxrwsr-x 2 6 Jul 1 14:35 _^ d r(2)s['rt'],*{m}; #r ~ ! \\not?/ The first one is too long to display on an 80 column screen, but it displays (weirdly) when used (it has a line-feed in the dir name): Ishtar:law/dp/^ difficult dir(to) "parse" ['correctly'], *{maybe}? ~; or #not> _ Ishtar:law/dp> cd _\^\ d\ r\(2\)s\[\'rt\'\]\,\*\{m\}\;\ #r\ ~\ \!\ \\\\not\?/ Ishtar:.../_^ d r(2)s['rt'],*{m}; #r ~ ! \not?> _ The cut-down in paths was put in an array: alias int=declare\ -i _e=echo _pf=printf exp=export ret=return exp __dpf__='local -a PF=( "/$1/$2/$3/../\${$[$#-1]}/\${$#}" "/$1/$2/../\${$[$#-1]}/\${$#}" "/$1/../\${$[$#-1]}/\${$#}" "/$1/../\${$#}" ".../\${$#}" "..." )' It tries to use a bit of the first part and some of the last part... Using more if you have dirs like "a/b/c...y/z". The function is: function spwd () { \ (($#)) || { _e "spwd called with null arg"; return 1; }; \ int w=COLUMNS/2 ;\ ( _pf -v _p "%s" "$1" ; export IFS=/ ;\ set $_p; shift; unset IFS ;\ t="${_p#${HOME%${USER}}}"; int tl=${#t} ;\ if (($#<=6 && tl