You definitely don't want to universally add the "./" prefix because it breaks on absolute paths. The only solution is for users to add the "./" prefix themsel

You definitely don't want to universally add the "./" prefix because it breaks on absolute paths. The only solution is for users to add the "./" prefix themselves when the path begins with "-", because many BSD userspaces don't support "--" as a marker to stop option parsing. Maybe that doesn't matter for a document with Linux in the title, but given the popularity of macOS for doing Linux development, I would still err on the side of supporting the BSDs for such things. Never mind that support for "--" outside GNU is very spotty, even on Linux. There is no point, in my opinion, in trying to be smart in small shell helper functions. It should just do a simple, relatively foolproof series of commands, and usually, bail early on error. But the intersection of `mkdir -p` failures and `cd` successes is tiny, so I didn't even bother muddying the waters by suggesting another alteration to use `&&`.