I work on a laptop that loves to power down when not used (the right thing to do), which often breaks the SSH session to my netlab server (not so good).

Reconnecting is trivial. Figuring out which lab I was working on and where it lives on the disk after a few hours? That’s the annoying part.

We solved most of that ages ago with the netlab status --all command. It shows all running labs¹ and their directories, so you can quickly jump back to where you were. However, even that gets tedious the 100th time you have to do it.

$ netlab status --all
Active lab instance(s)

┏━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ id      ┃ directory                 ┃ status  ┃ providers ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ default │ /home/user/net101/tools/X │ started │ clab      │
└─────────┴───────────────────────────┴─────────┴───────────┘

We added the --format json netlab status option in release 26.02, so it should be pretty easy to extract the lab directory from the netlab status printout and use some bash trickery to switch to that directory, right?

Here’s how I got it to work:

• The netlab status -i default --format json command displays the information about the default lab instance (I’m not using the multilab plugin for interactive work), for example:

$ netlab status -i default --format json
{
  "dir": "/home/user/net101/tools/X",
  "providers": [
    "clab"
  ],
  "log_line": "OK: netlab initial --no-message --deploy",
  "log": [
    "2026-03-17T11:50:07.482878+00:00: OK: containerlab version",
    "2026-03-17T11:50:07.496125+00:00: OK: bash -c [[ `containerlab version|awk '/version/ {print $2}'` > '0.71.999' ]] && echo OK",
    "2026-03-17T11:50:07.519617+00:00: OK: docker image ls --format json ceos:4.35.2F",
    "2026-03-17T11:50:07.521972+00:00: restarting lab",
...

• We can use jq to extract the dir value (the lab directory) from the printout:

$ netlab status -i default --format json | jq .dir
"/home/user/net101/tools/X"

• Using the -r jq option gets rid of the quotes:

$ netlab status -i default --format json | jq .dir -r
/home/user/net101/tools/X

• Using the results of that pipe as an argument to cd is exactly what we need:

$ cd $(netlab status -i default --format json | jq .dir -r)

• However, that’s clumsy, so let’s define an alias:

$ alias goback='cd $(netlab status -i default --format json | jq .dir -r)'

• After storing that alias in .bash_aliases script (or wherever your preferred shell keeps them), you can log in, execute goback, and you’re ready to work.

What’s not to love in the Unix philosophy ;)