The trick is you have to set it one level up from where you want the expansions to appear. So to allow "cd Downloads" to find /home/user/Downloads, you need to

The trick is you have to set it one level up from where you want the expansions to appear. So to allow "cd Downloads" to find /home/user/Downloads, you need to set CDPATH to /home/user Now all directorys in /home/user/* become match points for "cd dirname".