There are a couple of tricks you can use to save time in a BASH terminal, by making use of BASH's history, silently stored in the file ~/.bash_history. These work in all BASH terminals, including Konsole, XTerm and gnome-terminal.
Here are a couple of Tips:
- If you press the up, or down arrow, then BASH will cycle through the list of recently used commands
- If you type part of a command, and then press
, BASH will finish the command name for you. If there is more then one command, all of them are displayed on pressing again (see Command 2 in screenshot)
- If you type part of a filename, and then press
, then BASH will finish the filename for you. Again, if there is more than one option, all are diplayed on pressing again (see Command 3 in screenshot)
- Press ctrl-R. A search box comes up for you to find previous commands
- ! commands - This will search the History and execute a command. The command will be displayed before execution (See Commands 4-6). There are 5 ways you can use the ! in BASH
- !! - Execute The Last Command
- !x - Execute The Last Command Starting with x
- !-n - Execute The nth from last Command
- !?abc - Execute The last Command that contained abc
- !n - Execute The nth Command in history (not very useful)
- ctrl+u and ctrl+k 'cut' from the cursor to the beginning and the end of the line respectively. This can later be pasted using ctrl+y
- ctrl+w deletes a 'word' to the left of the cursor
- If you press alt+. then the last parameter you passed to any command will appear at the cursor. Example below: First time I press alt+., it displayed -lr, 2nd time I did it it displayed Desktop etc.
[adil@ahlinux ~]$ cd Desktop
[adil@ahlinux Desktop]$ ls -lr
[adil@ahlinux Desktop]$ -lr Desktop -l
- Define functions providing default options in
.bashrc
function ls
{
command ls -F "$@"
}
-
commandruns the real command -
"$@"inserts the user arguments
- Commands with arguments can have different names:
function duff
{
diff -ur "$@"
} - Safe to export, for use in shells embedded in editors:
export -f duff
- Leaves the original name alone for programs relying on it
You can use the search box as a calculator. In the screenshot above you see the result it gave me when I typed a interest calculation formula 1000*(1+0.11)^2 = 1232.10