I was just at a lecture, where I noticed the lecturer using a command (probably aliased) to jump to a specific folder.

Example:

~/code$ j sciproj
~/projects/sciproj2011/$

This looked quite slick, so I started wondering:

Is this a standard utility, and if so, what is the name?

I have two theories as to how it works:

1. It can both create, delete and jump to aliases directly from the command-line in the style of the example, without having to set up aliases in a configuration file or script or whatnot manually.

2. It searches the home directory for a folder matching the name and jumps to it.

The second option seems a bit slow, however, so the first would be preferred.