Shell Helpers

beachcomber ships a cache-warming hook that fires on directory changes. It is not a fallback script — it requires comb and is designed to eliminate the one-time cache miss when you cd into a new directory.

If you are looking for the opposite — a shim that makes integrations work without comb installed — see the Polyfill.

chpwd hook

scripts/chpwd.sh is a directory-change hook that pokes beachcomber whenever you cd into a new directory. It sends pokes for git, mise, terraform, python, direnv, and asdf — so by the time you run your first command in a new directory, the cache is already warm. Without this hook, the first query after a cd pays the cold-cache synchronous execution cost (see Troubleshooting → first query is slow).

Install

mkdir -p ~/.config/beachcomber
curl -fsSL https://beachcomber.sh/scripts/chpwd.sh -o ~/.config/beachcomber/chpwd.sh

Shell setup

Shell	Method
zsh	add-zsh-hook chpwd
bash	PROMPT_COMMAND
fish	conf.d/ file that sources the downloaded script

zsh — add to ~/.zshrc:

source ~/.config/beachcomber/chpwd.sh
autoload -Uz add-zsh-hook
add-zsh-hook chpwd _beachcomber_chpwd

bash — add to ~/.bashrc:

source ~/.config/beachcomber/chpwd.sh
PROMPT_COMMAND="${PROMPT_COMMAND:+$PROMPT_COMMAND; }_beachcomber_chpwd"

fish — create ~/.config/fish/conf.d/beachcomber.fish that sources the downloaded file and wires it up:

source ~/.config/beachcomber/chpwd.sh
function _beachcomber_chpwd_hook --on-variable PWD
    _beachcomber_chpwd
end

Behaviour

The hook is a no-op if comb is not installed — the command -v comb check at the top of the script exits silently when the binary is missing.

All pokes run in the background (&), so the hook adds no delay to your prompt or directory change. If the daemon is down, the background poke fails silently; the next foreground comb g will surface the error.