Bash Shortcuts

Today’s blog post will be a short one. When working in the terminal, knowing some keyboard commands can be a huge help. Keyboard shortcuts save your time (and your sanity).

Here is an overview of the ones that I use most regularly. Some of them are pretty obvious, others might be less common.

Useful commands

Jobs in the background

Job control in the linux shell amounts to be able to interrupt and resume commands (aka jobs). Usually, when a command is executed in the shell, it locks the shell and no further commands can be executed until it terminates. Sometimes this is quite annoying, especially, if the command is long-running and rather boring. Linux supports to run commands in the foreground and in the background.

By adding an ampersand character & after the command, the command starts in the background. While sleep 100 blocks the terminal for 100 seconds, sleep 100 & runs in the background and does not disturb anyone. But what if we forgot to type the ampersand character with the command? Don’t despair. That’s the job of ctrl+z. It suspends the job and gives you back the terminal prompt. By executing bg, you can send the job to the background, problem solved.

To get an overview of currently running jobs, just type jobs and have a look at what is running.

Movement commands

Sometimes, you have to correct a command line or just want to move the cursor around. These commands make moving the cursor a piece of cake.

As you might have noticed, these are the same commands as are used in emacs. This is not by accident. The default setting of most terminals is emacs mode. There is also vim mode which introduces the difference between ’normal’ and ‘insert’ mode to the terminal. I, personally, find that more confusing than useful although I use vim for editing whenever possible. And yes, this post is written with vim.