[emmelaich]

And yet ...

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/50058/what-is-the-p...

Yes, it's idiotic.

[version_five]

The question and highest rated reply there are very interesting and worth reading (at least for trivia value), thanks for that.

I don't understand what you meant is idiotic though

[ianai]

As that comment said, it’s there so utilities can use it for checking the return of “chdir()”. It’s at best a name conflict with a shell command with a well established past and use. At worst, it probably enables some bad code smells or outright malicious code.

[emmelaich]

I've seen questions about sudo (for instance) that ask why does "sudo chdir" not work.

By idiotic I think it's a mistake to blur the line between shell builtins and external commands.