Bash Shortcuts
Most of us are familiar with executing commands on terminal. But, did you now that bash has set of convinent shortcuts that can make our life a lot more easier.
Sometimes when we are typing command and all of a sudden we forget to add sudo. We can press CTRL + a and goto start of command line then type sudo
Now we are at the middle and we want to complete our command. Pressing CTRL + e will move your cursor to End of line
When we try to install VLC we forget to add -y on our command. We know how to move cursor in the beginning but, how do we move cursor back a word. Don’t worry bash has just the shortcut we need. If you want to traverse back a word at a time you can press ALT + b
In above GIF you can see that cursor is moved back twice. Hmm. All things looks good now. But WAIT!!!! We want to install GIT before VLC (consider it as dependency). We need to move cursor foward a word. We can press ALT + f
All of sudden you don’t want to install VLC now. Cursor is at beginning of vlc. To delete the line after the cursor we can use CTRL + k.
Hmm. now we don’t want to install GIT either. Since your cursor is at end we can use CTRL + w to delete just one word before the cursor.
We don’t know what to install now. To delete remaining incomplete command you can use CTRL + u
Searching History #
Lets see how we can search through history. For demonstration here is the list of history that I have
Pressing CTRL + p will navigate back to history.
You may have guessed to go foward we have CTRL + n
CTRL + p and CTRL + n is handy shortcut but often when we search our history we may know letter / word the command starts with. Lets say we want to search history that start with command. Type command on terminal and pressing ALT + p will go back one history which starts with letter / word that is provided in our case command.
Similarly pressing ALT + n will navigate foward one history which starts with letter / word that is provided.
When we search through history we may not know how command is started. But, we may have a know some letters / word that the command has. In that case we can use CTRL + r to search history. Pressing CTRL + r will search the history and checks if the letters / word you provided is avaiable on any part of the command. Suppose you have a command like below
bundle exec jekyll serve
To search this command you can press CTRL + r and press any letters / word that is present on command. For example we can search by using word jekyll.
We may not find the command right away. We can go back a history again by pressing CTRL + r. If you want to move foward you can use CTRL + s.
Here’s the simple example of moving backward and foward a history. (Using the history that was shown above)
Notice in above GIF when I was traversing back to history [CTRL + r], we can see text bck-i-search. And when I was traversing foward to history [CTRL + s], we can see text fwd-i-search
Let me know if you found this post useful. If I missed some cool shortcut that bash provides please add it in the comment below.