What OS are you on? If you're on Linux or MacOS, you can use `pushd` and `popd`.
On bash, I have some aliases set up. they will move you to the right directory, run arc or anarki, then when it exits, move you back to the original folder.
alias arc="pushd ~/programs/arc/arc3.2/; rlwrap racket -f as.scm; popd"
alias anarki="pushd ~/programs/arc/anarki/; ./arc.sh; popd"
I normally use fish shell, but functions there are simple enough to make based on the bash aliases.
Getting back after arc is not the problem; even if I didn't have cd history set up a simple `cd -` would handle that.
Simple problem: I have a file containing a program written in Arc. I want to run it from the shell. How do I do that? I can fire up arc and `(load)` the file, but then the file needs to be in the arc2.3 dir or else I have to load it by absolute path, even if I was just in the same directory it's in.
For now I've just switched to using Anarki; I can run its `arc.sh` start script from anywhere in the filesystem and feed it a locally-relative pathname and it will run. Although it does seem to take quite a lot longer to start up than arc.