What is your single most favorite command-line trick using Bash? [closed]

Answer 1

Here's a couple of configuration tweaks:

~/.inputrc:

"\C-[[A": history-search-backward
"\C-[[B": history-search-forward

This works the same as ^R but using the arrow keys instead. This means I can type (e.g.) cd /media/ then hit up-arrow to go to the last thing I cd'd to inside the /media/ folder.

(I use Gnome Terminal, you may need to change the escape codes for other terminal emulators.)

Bash completion is also incredibly useful, but it's a far more subtle addition. In ~/.bashrc:

if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
    . /etc/bash_completion
fi

This will enable per-program tab-completion (e.g. attempting tab completion when the command line starts with evince will only show files that evince can open, and it will also tab-complete command line options).

Works nicely with this also in ~/.inputrc:

set completion-ignore-case on
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set show-all-if-unmodified on

Answer 2

Similar to many above, my current favorite is the keystroke [alt]. (Alt and "." keys together) this is the same as $! (Inserts the last argument from the previous command) except that it's immediate and for me easier to type. (Just can't be used in scripts)

eg:

mkdir -p /tmp/test/blah/oops/something
cd [alt].

Answer 3

You can use the watch command in conjunction with another command to look for changes. An example of this was when I was testing my router, and I wanted to get up-to-date numbers on stuff like signal-to-noise ratio, etc.

watch --interval=10 lynx -dump http://dslrouter/stats.html

Answer 4

I've always been partial to:

ctrl-E # move cursor to end of line
ctrl-A # move cursor to beginning of line

I also use shopt -s cdable_vars, then you can create bash variables to common directories. So, for my company's source tree, I create a bunch of variables like:

export Dcentmain="/var/localdata/p4ws/centaur/main/apps/core"

then I can change to that directory by cd Dcentmain.

Answer 5

How to list only subdirectories in the current one ?

ls -d */

It's a simple trick, but you wouldn't know how much time I needed to find that one !

Answer 6

$ touch {1,2}.txt
$ ls [12].txt
1.txt  2.txt
$ rm !:1
rm [12].txt
$ history | tail -10
...
10007  touch {1,2}.txt
...
$ !10007
touch {1,2}.txt
$ for f in *.txt; do mv $f ${f/txt/doc}; done