The Daily Admin

Bash Navigating Shortcuts

Here are few great shortcuts that will make navigating in BASH a bit easier.  This also works in many other shells, as I am often in Korn Shell in our AIX and HP-UX machines.

I learned a few shortcuts a while ago from this website, as well as this one.

These were taking from the “Command Line Editing” in the bash manual. The bash manual is a well-written piece of documentation. It would do all SysAdmins well to read this manual a few times.

Well, here’s the new shortcuts I learned:

Basic moves

• Move back one character. Ctrl + b
• Move forward one character. Ctrl + f
• Delete current character. Ctrl + d
• Delete previous character. Backspace
• Undo. Ctrl + -

Moving faster

• Move to the start of line. Ctrl + a
• Move to the end of line. Ctrl + e
• Move forward a word. Meta + f (a word contains alphabets and digits, no symbols)
• Move backward a word. Meta + b
• Clear the screen. Ctrl + l

What is Meta? Meta is your Alt key, normally. For Mac OSX user, you need to enable it yourself. Open Terminal > Preferences > Settings > Keyboard, and enable Use option as meta key. Meta key, by convention, is used for operations on word.

Cut and paste (‘Kill and yank’ for old schoolers)

• Cut from cursor to the end of line. Ctrl + k
• Cut from cursor to the end of word. Meta + d
• Cut from cursor to the start of word. Meta + Backspace
• Cut from cursor to previous whitespace. Ctrl + w
• Paste the last cut text. Ctrl + y
• Loop through and paste previously cut text. Meta + y (use it after Ctrl + y)
• Loop through and paste the last argument of previous commands. Meta + .

Search the command history

• Search as you type. Ctrl + r and type the search term; Repeat Ctrl + r to loop through results.
• Search the last remembered search term. Ctrl + r twice.
• End the search at current history entry. Ctrl + j
• Cancel the search and restore original line. Ctrl +