Tips and Tricks for interactive use

Ergonomics is important.

• Use TAB completion whenever possible:

  • it saves keystrokes

  • it validates what you are trying to type (if autocompletion does not work, probably you’ve made a typo or a file you are trying to )

• Arrow up/down: go backwards/forwards in history

  • Use && to chain commands and create groups of commands that can be reused

• History expansion: do not repeat yourself

  • Use CTRL-R/S to incrementally search backwards/forwards in history

  • !! is the last command

  • Use history | grep <command-fragment> to search for a command and get its number

  • !<n> is the n-th command in the history,

  • shopt -s histverify: show the command before executing it

  • You can do other crazy things. Search for HISTORY EXPANSION in man bash.

Suggestions?

Are you willing to discuss and share your own ergonomic tricks?

Feel free to edit this page!