This week’s TechMail is Tips and tricks for working on the command line which points out a few simple things you can do on the CLI to make life easier for yourself, such as renaming files or dealing with history, and some lesser-known character sequences you can use.
Funny thing is this tip has generated quite a few comments already on the site. Unfortunately, most people are talking about Windows and MS PowerShell (whatever that is). Weird.
1 Comment
One thing I find _extremely_ useful is the history-search-forward and history-search-backward bash commands. I bind them to crtl-up and ctrl-down. So, for example, by just typing “cd ” then ctrl-up/down, I can browse through previous commands beginning with “cd”.
I’m surprise this feature is so little known, it would be great if it was configured by default.
The only problem is ctrl-up/down doesn’t generate the same thing in putty or in a terminal through vnc, so I have to put 3 lines in .inputrc for each binding