Escaping Characters
- Using Backslash escape sequences
- Backslash escape sequences
- \a => Bell
- \b => Backspace
- \n => new line
- \r => Carriage return
- \t => Tab return
Keyboard tricks
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bash uses a library called Readline to implement command line editing.
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Cursor Movement Commands
- CTRL-A : Move the cursor to begining of the line
- CTRL-E : MOve the cursor to the end of line
- CTRL-F: same as right arrow key
- CTRL-B: same as left arrow key
- ALT-F: Move cursor forward by one word
- ALT-B: Move cursor backward by one word
- CTRL-L: same as using clear command
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Modifying Text:
- CTRL-D: Delete the character at cursor location
- CTRL-T: exchanges the character at the cursor location with one preceding it
- ALT-T: exchanges the word at the cursor location with one preceding it
- ALT-U: converts the characters from cursor location to the end of the line to uppercase
- ALT-L: converts the characters from cursor location to the end of the line to lowercase
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Killing and yanking (Cutting and Pasting) Text
- CTRL-K: Kill text from the cursor location to the end of the line
- CTRL-U: Kill text from the cursor location to the begining of the line
- CTRL-Y: Yank the text from kill-ring (clipboard) and insert at current cursor location
- ALT-D: kill text from cursor location to the end of current word
- ALT-backspace: kill text from cursor location to the begining of current word
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COMPLETION: shell can help you through a mechanism called as completion. Completion occurs when your press TAB key while typing command
- In Recent versions of bash has a facility called as programmable completion.
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Using History
- Bash maintains the history of commands that have been entered. This list of commands are kept in your home directory in a file called as bash_history
- commands to try
history history|less
- Commands
- CTRL-P or up-arrow: Move up to the previous history entry
- CTRL-N or down-arrow: Move to the next history entry
- Seqence Action
- !!: Repeat the last command
- !number: Repeat history list item number
- !string: Repeat last history item starting with string
- !?string: Repeat last history item containing string
