I'm writing a simple ruby sandbox command-line utility to copy and unzip directories from a remote filesystem to a local scratch directory in order to unzip them and let users edit the files. I'm using Dir.mktmpdir as the default scratch directory, which gives a really ugly path (for example: /var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee+++1vE+++yo/-Tmp-/d20100311-70034-abz5zj)

I'd like the last action of the copy-and-unzip script to cd the calling shell into the new scratch directory so people can access it easily, but I can't figure out how to change the PWD of the calling shell. One possibility is to have the utility print out the new path to stdout and then run the script as part of a subshell (i.e. cd $(sandbox my_dir) ), but I want to print out progress on the copy-and-unzipping since it can take up to 10 minutes, so this won't work. Should I just have it go to a pre-determined, easy-to-find scratch directory? Does anyone have a better suggestion? Thanks in advance for your help. -Erik