Or: never do history | grep again!

The command line interface of the *nix systems is amazing and Windows doesn’t have anything that comes even close to it (although I still have to experiment with PowerShell – I like very much the base idea that instead of text lines you get objects with well defined properties and you don’t have to play the I check two cases and throw out a regular expression which will die in the particular cases game). A nice thing I discovered recently are the shortcut keys you can use:

Ctrl + A

Go to the beginning of the line you are currently typing on

Ctrl + E

Go to the end of the line you are currently typing on

Ctrl + L

Clears the Screen, similar to the clear command

Ctrl + U

Clears the line before the cursor position. If you are at the end of the line, clears the entire line.

Ctrl + H

Same as backspace

Ctrl + R

Let’s you search through previously used commands. This is the one that can replace the history | grep process.

Ctrl + C

Kill whatever you are running – proably a well known to everyone

Ctrl + D

Exit the current shell. Also known as end of stream – basically the shell terminates because you’ve said there will be no more input from here!

Ctrl + Z

Puts whatever you are running into a suspended background process. fg restores it.

Ctrl + W

Delete the word before the cursor

Ctrl + K

Clear the line after the cursor

Ctrl + T

Swap the last two characters before the cursor

Esc + T

Swap the last two words before the cursor

Alt + F

Move cursor forward one word on the current line

Alt + B

Move cursor backward one word on the current line

Tab

Auto-complete files and folder names

For more keyboard shortcut goodies, visit the following sites:

• Howto Geek
• Pio’s blog
• Lifehacker 1
• Lifehacker 2
• Lifehacker 3
• Bash shortcuts

Or just search for bash shortcuts with your favorite search engine.