Shell Tips !

Last day, one of my friends was doing some stuff on its Mac OSX Term without using any shortcuts. I suggest some of them (which are POSIX, GNU or Shell keys combinations) to him and he answer me : Why don’t you post it on shell-tips.com ?!

Those shortcuts are for Bash shell but it’s probably work with other advance shells.

Control Keys combinations (CTRL+KEY)

1. ctrl+a : move your cursor to the beginning of the line
2. ctrl+e : move your cursor to the end of the line
3. ctrl+k : delete any characters from your cursor to the end of the line
4. ctrl+u : delete any characters from your cursor to the beginning of the line
5. ctrl+w : delete previous word
6. ctrl+t : transpose two previous characters
7. ctrl+y : yank/recover the last deletion
8. ctrl+d : delete one character at the cursor position
9. ctrl+h : delete one character before the cursor
10. ctrl+f : move forward (or use the right arrow ! :-)
11. ctrl+b : move backward (or use the left arrow ! :-)
12. ctrl+r : find character sequence in history (completion mode)
13. ctrl+g : escape from completion mode
14. ctrl+v : Literal next (LNEXT)

NB: LNEXT interpret the next character as a string. eg : for symbolize a CR+LF you must do the key combination ctrl+v+return, that will print ^M.

Escape Keys combinations (ESC+KEY)

1. esc+d : delete from the cursor position to the end of the word
2. esc+f : move forward a word
3. esc+b : move backward a word
4. esc+t : transpose two adjacent words

Other common keys

1. Use up/down arrows to move thru the bash command history
2. Use left/right arrows to move on the current line
3. Use tabulation key (TAB) for auto-complete a command name or a file name
4. Use exclamation key + command name for repeat last similar command (ex. : !vi will recall the last vi command)

Enjoy ! ;-)

If you want to tune your PROMPT you just need to use… the PROMPT command ! By default the prompt is set to the current path, but you can customize it a little.

# Display prompt help

PROMPT /?

# Customize your prompt

PROMPT $T $D$_$P $F

# Will give this result in my cmd window

17:11:55,31 sam. 21/10/2006

D:\Documents and Settings\Nicolas>

In our list of “CLI workaround for Windows XP“, a missing command is LESS. Now, you can have a LESS-Like command with the DOS command LIST. Get the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit tools on microsoft.com. While not 100% functionally-equivalent to most versions of the UNIX LESS command, list does support text searching and bi-directional scrolling. This command is useful when examining log files (such as web server logs), configuration files, and software “read me” files when you don’t want to open a Notepad window.

# Usage

filename
REQUIRED - The filename you wish to view

-s:STRING
Performs a case insensitive search and highlights the first line matching your search text

-g:LINE#
The list display will jump to the specified line number, displaying it at the bottom of the screen. Note that list starts its line numbering from line 0.