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

• 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.