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Cheat sheets

Shell shortcuts cheat sheet

Move faster in Bash: readline keys, history search and expansion, brace expansion, globbing and the small tricks that save typing.

2 min read

Moving

KeysAction
Ctrl-A / Ctrl-EStart / end of line
Alt-B / Alt-FBack / forward one word
Ctrl-X Ctrl-XJump between the cursor and the start of the line

Editing

KeysAction
Ctrl-WDelete the word before the cursor
Alt-DDelete the word after
Ctrl-U / Ctrl-KDelete to start / end of line
Ctrl-YPaste what you just deleted
Alt-.Insert the last argument of the previous command (repeat for older ones)
Ctrl-_Undo
Alt-U / Alt-LUpper / lower case the next word
Ctrl-X Ctrl-EOpen the line in $EDITOR

Control

KeysAction
Ctrl-CCancel the command
Ctrl-ZSuspend; fg brings it back
Ctrl-DEnd of input; exits an empty shell
Ctrl-LClear the screen
Ctrl-S / Ctrl-QFreeze / unfreeze output (the “my terminal hung” key)
KeysAction
Ctrl-RSearch back; press again for older matches
Ctrl-SSearch forward (needs stty -ixon)
Ctrl-GLeave the search without running anything
Ctrl-P / Ctrl-NPrevious / next command

History expansion

SyntaxExpands to
!!The previous command: sudo !!
!$Its last argument
!^Its first argument
!*All its arguments
!42Command 42 from history
!sshThe last command starting with ssh
^old^newPrevious command with old replaced by new
!!:pPrint it without running

Brace expansion

bash
cp nginx.conf{,.bak}                    # cp nginx.conf nginx.conf.bak
mv report.{txt,md}
mkdir -p project/{src,tests,docs}
echo web{1..5}.example.com
touch log-{01..12}.txt                  # zero-padded
echo {a..e}

Globbing

PatternMatches
*Anything in one directory level
?One character
[0-9]One digit
**Any depth (after shopt -s globstar)
!(*.log)Everything except .log (after shopt -s extglob)
bash
shopt -s globstar nullglob
ls **/*.yaml

Directories

bash
cd -                                    # back to the previous directory
pushd /etc/nginx; popd                  # a directory stack
cd ~alice                               # someone's home

History settings

~/.bashrc
HISTSIZE=100000
HISTFILESIZE=200000
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth:erasedups        # skip duplicates and lines starting with a space
HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '
shopt -s histappend                     # don't overwrite history from other terminals

Start a command with a space to keep it, and any secret in it, out of history.

Keep in mind

  • These are readline defaults (Emacs mode). set -o vi switches to vi keys.
  • In many terminals Alt needs to be set to send Meta. If Alt-. doesn’t work, Esc then . does the same.

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