Today, I found another use of current directory — single dot .. Before, I occasionally use it with mv or cp commands like

# copying file to current directory from somewhere else
cp /path/to/foo .
# moving a file in sub-directory to current directory
mv subdir/bar .

The usage is:

cd .

Changing to current directory may not make sense without context. I have an encrypted directory, say ~/secret/ here, which is encrypted and mounted by EncFS. Quite often I forget to mount first before change to ~/secret, so it will be just an empty directory. When that happen I move up one directory and mount the encrypted directory with a helper script I wrote, then cd into the directory again.

That is okay, but really unnecessary. Now, I can just run

cd ~/secret
ls
# shoot! forgot to mount first
script-to-mount
cd .

Voilà, the encrypted files are there. . alone is quite useful sometimes, however it’s still not used in many cases and cd . probably is only useful in this case.