WCD - Wherever Change Directory

Wcd is a command-line program to change directory fast. It saves time typing at the keyboard. One needs to type only a part of a directory name and wcd will jump to it. Wcd has a fast selection method in case of multiple matches and allows aliasing and banning of directories. Wcd also includes a full screen interactive directory tree browser with speed search.

Wcd was modeled after Norton Change Directory (NCD). NCD appeared first in The Norton Utilities, Release 4, for DOS in 1987, published by Peter Norton. NCD was written by Brad Kingsbury.

wcd Desk

wcd *top

Wcd is free to use and you can get the source code too.

Features of wcd:

Full screen interactive directory browser with speed search and zoom in/out.

Present the user a list in case of multiple matches.

Wildcards *, ? and [SET] supported.

Directory stack, push pop.

Subdir definition possible. E.g. wcd subdira/subdirb

Long directory names support in Win95/98/NT DOS-box

Windows LAN UNC paths supported.

Change drive and directory at once.

Alias directories.

Ban directories.

Exclude directories.

Alternate stack per shell or terminal.

Multi user: Jump to folders of your colleagues.

Multi platform:

• DOS 16 bit, DOS 32 bit, DOS bash
• Windows Command Prompt, Windows PowerShell, WinZsh, MSYS, Cygwin
• Unix/Linux: all Bourne and C type shells.
• OS/2 Warp

Native language support: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese simplified, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Friulian, German, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Unicode Level 3 support (all UCS characters including double width and combining characters).

• Unix/Linux
• Cygwin.
• Windows PowerShell.
• Windows Command Prompt (cmd.exe) on Windows 7 and up.
• Unicode matching with normalization (compatible equivalence).

Option to ignore diacritics for Latin-based scripts.

SCREENSHOTS.

Manual

Brazilian Portuguese

Dutch

English

French

German

Romanian

Serbian

Swedish

Ukrainian

How to install wcd on DOS, Windows, or OS/2.
How to build wcd for DOS, Windows, or OS/2 with GCC.
How to build wcd for DOS, Windows, or OS/2 with Watcom C.
How to build wcd for Windows with Microsoft Visual C.
How to build and install wcd on Unix/Linux/Cygwin.

How to open wcd best match directory in Windows Explorer.

Download WCD:

For previous releases see: Old versions of wcd

Ready-to-Run binaries

TIP: DOS/Windows with PDCurses interface: Set environment variable PDC_RESTORE_SCREEN so that the screen will be restored after wcd exits. Add this to your autoexec.bat file: set PDC_RESTORE_SCREEN=1

• Linux
  • distributions
  • Wcd package for Debian at http://packages.debian.org/wcd
  • Wcd package for Ubuntu at http://packages.ubuntu.com/
  • Wcd package for Linux Mint at http://community.linuxmint.com/software/view/wcd
  • Wcd package for Puppy Linux. See here.
  • Wcd package for Fedora. See here (rpmfind.net).
  • Wcd package for Gentoo Linux. See here.
  • Wcd package for openSUSE see here.
    
• DOS / Windows 95/98/ME
  • 16 bit Real Mode (Without Native Language Support)
    • wcd605b.zip English
  • 32 bit Protected Mode
    A fast 32 bit DOS version which supports long directory names in a Windows 95/98 DOS-box. Requires 80386 CPU or higher.
    • wcd605pm.zip DOS32. English
    • wcd605pm-nls.zip DOS32. International
  • BASH 32 bit
    This version is to be used in the DJGPP DOS port of the Unix Bourne Again Shell (bash). Requires 80386 CPU or higher.
    • wcd605bh.zip DOS32 BASH. English
    • wcd605bh-nls.zip DOS32 BASH. International
  • distributions
  • Wcd package for FreeDos. See here.
• Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10

  With long directory name and Windows LAN UNC paths support. If special characters (e.g. accented characters) are not shown properly, see the manual section WINDOWS CODE PAGES. I recommend to use the Unicode version when possible.

  When you switch from the non-Unicode version to the Unicode version, or vice versa, you need to rescan all your drives.

  You need to set the font to a True Type font (Lucida Console or Consolas in a Western region) when you have international directory names. See also the manual section UTF-16 on Windows.

  • Windows Command Prompt (cmd.exe) Unicode support in Command Prompt requires Windows 7 or higher. Unicode does not work on older Windows versions. Unicode does work in Take Command/TCC on Windows XP/Vista.
    • wcd-6.0.5-win64.zip English
    • wcd-6.0.5-win64-nls-ucs.zip International, Unicode.
    • wcd-6.0.5-win32.zip English
    • wcd-6.0.5-win32-nls-ucs.zip International, Unicode.
  • Windows PowerShell. See also Windows PowerShell (WikiPedia). UNC paths are supported directly, no mapping to drive letters needed. Note: Only the file system provider is supported, no other providers.
    • wcd-6.0.5-win64psh.zip English
    • wcd-6.0.5-win64psh-nls-ucs.zip International, Unicode.
    • wcd-6.0.5-win32psh.zip English
    • wcd-6.0.5-win32psh-nls-ucs.zip International, Unicode.
  • WinZsh and Tcsh. UNC paths are supported directly, no mapping to drive letters needed.
    • wcd-6.0.5-win64zsh.zip English
    • wcd-6.0.5-win64zsh-nls-ucs.zip International, Unicode
    • wcd-6.0.5-win32zsh.zip English
    • wcd-6.0.5-win32zsh-nls-ucs.zip International, Unicode
  • MSYS. You can use the win32zsh, or the native MSYS version. The PDCurses interface does not work in the rxvt and mintty terminal, because those terminals don't accept standard input from native win32 programs (see also here). Alternative good terminals are ConEmu and Console (also known as Console2) and ConsoleZ. The Zsh version uses Command Prompt style paths like c:/Windows, the native MSYS versions use MSYS style paths like /c/Windows.
  • wcd-6.0.5-win32zsh.zip For ConEmu/Console. (PDCurses)
  • wcd-6.0.3-msys1-i686-pdcurses-nls.tar.gz For ConEmu/Console. (PDCurses)
  • wcd-6.0.3-msys1-i686-ncurses-nls.tar.gz For Mintty. (ncurses). This requires ncurses for msys1. Use the mingw-get installer to install msys-libncurses-dll and msys-terminfo.
  • MSYS2. You can use the win32zsh, or the native MSYS2 version. The PDCurses interface does not work in the mintty terminal, because that terminals doesn't accept standard input from native win32 programs (see also here for a similar problem with msys 1 and the rxvt terminal). Alternative good terminals are ConEmu and Console and ConsoleZ. The Zsh version uses Command Prompt style paths like c:/Windows, the native MSYS versions use MSYS style paths like /c/Windows.
  • Native msys2 for Mintty (ncurses), use the msys2 package installer: pacman -S wcd
  • wcd-6.0.5-win32zsh.zip For ConEmu/Console. (PDCurses)
  msys2 versions require ncurses, gettext, libiconv, and libunistring.
  • Cygwin (i686). Behaves as the Unix versions. UNC paths are supported directly, no mapping to drive letters needed.
    • Cygwin: Install wcd via the Cygwin "setup.exe" installer. See Cygwin. Look under category "Utils".
• HP-UX
  • Binaries for HP-UX versions can be found at The porting and archiving centre for HP-UX
• AIX
  • Perzl.org
• Mac OS X/Darwin
• MacPorts.
• OS/2 WARP
  • hobbes.nmsu.edu /pub/os2/dev/util
  • Install EMX version (i686 or pentium4) with command: "yum install wcd". Requires EMX 1_5-p4 environment. See here. (Thanks to Elbert Pol)
  • wcd-6.0.5-os2-watcom.zip Native OS/2 i386, built with Watcom C.
  • wcd-6.0.2-os2bash.zip For use in EMX bash.

Source Code

• wcd-6.0.5.tar.gz Sources, Unix text
• wcd-6.0.5.tar.gz.asc PGP Signature
• wcd605.zip Sources, DOS text.

Latest development version from Git repository:

git clone https://git.code.sf.net/p/wcd/wcd

Source code libintl DLL

WCD related links

• SourceForge: The Wcd project page is at https://sourceforge.net/projects/wcd/.
• VIM: wcd.vim : Wherever Change Directory in vim

Notification of new versions

Want to be notified whenever a new version of WCD arrives? Send an email to with subject wcd add. Write in the email for which operating system you use wcd. (Your e-mail address will only be used for notification of new versions of wcd. It will not be given to any third party.) You will not get a notification of all beta versions, only when there are important changes in a beta release. To remove your e-mail address from the list send an email with subject wcd remove.

You can also subscribe to the wcd project page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/wcd/. Beta versions are never notified via SourceForge. New releases are announced at freshcode.club.

Alternative implementations

DOS

Windows 9x/NT

Unix

Contact