DEV Community

10 simple Linux tips which save 50% of my time in the command line

javinpaul on August 18, 2019

Disclosure: This post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided i...

Read full post

Ian Robertson • Aug 18 '19 • Edited

One key I love in Bash and Zsh is meta-dot (or alt-period or escape-period). It is a bit like up arrow, but rather than replacing the curren line, it inserts the last word of the previous line. Pressing it multiple times cycles through multiple preceding lines.

For example, you just ran

somecommand > longfilename

and want to open the resulting file in vi, you can type

vi meta-dot

and longfilename will be inserted on your command line after vi.

Sven Kanoldt • Aug 22 '19

Whether you are in bash or zsh, you can use the ! operator quite flexible:

If we take: echo a b c d as an example

!$          # the last argument: d
!:*         # all the arguments: a b c d (can be shorten !*)
!:1         #  the first argument: a (same as !^)
!:1-3       # arguments from first to third: a b c
!:2-$       # arguments from the second to the last one: b c d

javinpaul • Aug 18 '19

Wow, nice to know that, how do you type meta-dot? just literal?

Ian Robertson • Aug 18 '19

Depends on your keyboard layout; most likely your meta key is "alt", so typing a period while holding down the alt key would do the trick. You can also type the escape key, followed by a period.

devloco • Aug 20 '19 • Edited

# Did you forget to use "sudo" with a command?
# Use this alias to auto add sudo and re-run it.
#
# usage example:
# > apt update
# Could not open lock file /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
# > oops


alias oops='sudo $(fc -ln -1)'

Jing Xue • Aug 18 '19

Within vim, you can more quickly switch back and forth between two files - buffers, technically - by ctrl-6. If you have more than two files, you can still switch between them by ":bn" where n is a buffer number. That's not slower than ctrl-z then "fg n".

javinpaul • Aug 20 '19

Thx @Jing Xue, awesome tip for vim users.

Brendan Hansknecht • Aug 18 '19

Nice article. Personally, I feel that a lot of people can get a huge boost in shell productivity by installing oh-my-zsh and some nice plugins.

I'm also pro cobalt2 color scheme(not sure it really helps that much with productivity though)

javinpaul • Aug 20 '19

@brendan , looks like a nice idea, but most of the time you don't have the luxury of those plugins on highly secure corporate infrastructure like on a big investment banks.

8ucik • Aug 21 '19

JavinPaul is true about this. On such an infrastructure you can' t have plugins installed and use them all around. Although I have got the option to use zsh I love the idea of using Ctrl + R.

The best useful thing I have found is the option to set aliases. You can have a cd into folder then run a program do a copy of the result and then return to the home folder. Just in one command.

This is a deal breaker for me that when I switch to a Windows environment I can't handle it.

javinpaul • Aug 18 '19

Yes, technically you are correct, most of them are bash built-in. You also mentioned a couple of good points which I didn't know before, thx for adding value.

Simon Massey • Aug 24 '19

This is a massive one. You can:

history | grep git

To see all the things you were doing then:

!2177

it's a bit more keystrokes than ”ctrl+r all” to find a command but helps you reread what you did. So i mix these two often.

Jan Wedel • Aug 19 '19

Hi, and thanks for the article! I love those shell short cuts. It makes working in it extremely fast and fun!

One meta point: You’ve added those equal signs to underline the headings, this actually looks very bad on mobile browsers or the dev.to app. Just open it on your phone. Would you mind removing them?

Thanks!

javinpaul • Aug 20 '19

Thx @jan for pointing it out. I have removed them.

Brian Masinick • Sep 1 '19

I keep a script that can run (with very minor changes, if any) across several of the "sh" based shells, including the original AT&T sh, ksh, zsh, and bash, though the newer shells now incorporate quite a bit of the functionality, so I've used them less frequently recently:

directory stack functions

declare -i DNUM=0
DLIST[DNUM]=pwd

function g # go to a directory
{
if builtin cd "$@" >/dev/null && [ ${DLIST[DNUM]} != "$PWD" ]
then
DNUM=DNUM+1
DLIST[DNUM]=$PWD
fi

if DISPLAY exists, then set titlebar and icon.

if [ -n "$DISPLAY" ]; then
    titlebar="$USER @ $HOST : $PWD"
fi
pwd

}

function gb # go back
{
if (( $DNUM > 0 ))
then
DNUM=DNUM-1
fi
g ${DLIST[DNUM]}
}

function gn # go to selected (nth) dir
{
select DIR in echo ${DLIST[*]} | tr " " "\012" | sort -u -y0
do
if [ "$DIR" ]
then
g $DIR
else
g $REPLY
fi
break
done
}

function up # go up n levels
{
declare -i levels

levels=${1}

if [ -z "${1}" ] && [ ${PWD} != "/" ]
then
  g ..
  return $?
fi

while [ ${levels} -gt 0 ] && [ ${PWD} != "/" ]
do
  g ..
  levels=levels-1
done

}

function addpath
{
PATH=$PATH:$1
echo $PATH
}

function todo
{
echo date '+%D %H:%M' >> ~/todo
echo "$*" >> ~/todo
echo >> ~/todo
}

Main # <--- Main

Set the default directory and file protection mask. By default, do

not mask any protection on my ownership, but remove default write

access for the group, and do not give "world" any default access.

(I add or subtract various things, adding functions or procedures

that I am frequently using, and remove them when inappropriate

at a particular assignment. Sometimes I can send portions of a

script by Email; other times sending anything in is frowned upon

so I have to create bits and pieces of my personal tools manually).

export SHELL=~/bin/bash # usually my default shell
umask 022

OS=$(uname)
myterm=$(who am i)
myterm=$(echo $myterm | awk -F" " '{ print $2 }')
echo "The current HOST is $HOST"
echo "The current terminal is $myterm"
echo "The current shell is $SHELL"

return # get out of any functions I may be in

Finished .bashrc

Jusus • Aug 21 '19

I don't know if it's just me but this article read really badly. It's not entirely clear what the actual commands are and your affiliate links all the way through really detract from the important stuff.

Peter Witham • Aug 18 '19

Great collection of tips, I use the history grep a lot for not only finding what I need but also checking what I did to make sure that in the past I got it right :)

8 is something I still forget to do, which I blame on using those 'other' systems making me actually CD all the time.

Thanks for this.

javinpaul • Aug 20 '19

@peter , history| grep is the holy grail, I learned a lot by doing just that and learning about what find, grep, and lsof options other teammates are using :-)

Alvarez García • Aug 22 '19

Hey nice list.. thanks for sharing it and encourage programmers to use terminal.
I want to share one that I use commonly:

$ grep -nHri 'string'

It searches case insensitive recursively on current dir and shows number of line and file of each occurence.

Filipe Esperandio • Aug 22 '19

Not long ago I started using shell param expansion more and more and it is definitely a booster:
mv path/to/some/file/that/is/long/and/hard/to/type/{file,new_file_name}.txt

Darren Gibbard • Aug 18 '19 • Edited

FYI; I noticed you switch to egrep when splitting multiple matches with pipe; you can escape the pipe and stick with regular grep too:

mycommand | grep "string1\|string2"

javinpaul • Aug 18 '19

Thx, I'll try thins, somehow I never used grep like that :-)

巴 • Aug 19 '19 • Edited

May sound captious but at the first glance, I thought that it would be perfect with the below

Have you ever been* amazed to see …

javinpaul • Aug 20 '19

thx for suggestion included. And, no you are not captious, keep on suggesting :-)

Jakub L. • Aug 22 '19 • Edited

sudo !! is one of my favorite tricks in bash. It saves a lot of time!

The OpenShift Ninja • Aug 21 '19

Great article! If someone hasn't also suggested it, I suggest you look at fzf, which makes control-r a much better experience.

github.com/junegunn/fzf

I would also suggest oh-my-zsh which has a lot of plugins and tools that make your command line life easier.

github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh

Simon Massey • Aug 24 '19 • Edited

As bash and vi is preinstalled on corporate linux and modern cloud hosts i have “set -o vi” in my profile to practice using vi keybindings day to day. I stick to bash as i cannot install other shells onto production hosts when firefighting outages. Using vi shortcuts in bash I can up arrow or ctrl+r to a line, hit esc to exit edit mode, and use vi keys to jump around and edit the line super fast. Then in an outage I can open configuration files in vi and know how to edited them very fast.

I think thats a good tip for new folks that being a rock star on your laptop using other shells and extensions that aren’t installed in production isn’t a transferable skill to “cattle not pets” cloud infra. Being a rockstar on your own laptop using exotic shells will wow your friends. Being a rockstar on a cloud vm during an outage using ancient tools and an empty profile will wow your team mates and the CTO.

I posted how to install git in bash inside visual studio code on windows which is how i stay sharp and ready to be a commandline ninja when trapped on a mandatory corporate windows laptop for day to day work.

🦄N B🛡 • Oct 16 '20 • Edited

Being a rockstar on a cloud vm during an outage using ancient tools and an empty profile will wow your team mates and the CTO.

I have lived an extreme example of this, when I had to fix a production outage by texting someone Linux commands.

dmorehead • Aug 19 '19

Try tcsh ..used it on everything from nextstep to irix to linux to Darwin today ..has the most creature comforts of any command line shell ..including many if not more of the ones mentioned :)

The OpenShift Ninja • Aug 21 '19

I used tcsh back in the day... zsh is better :)

Leah • Aug 19 '19

Try fish shell and don't worry about 1-4 🙃

javinpaul • Aug 20 '19

Is that a real shell? never heard about that.

Stephen Whitmore • Mar 7 '21

CTRL+R ftw! I didn't know about this one for the longest time. I use it every day now! Saves so much time and seems to be the fastest of all the history oriented commands you listed here