Bash Productivity Tips

I want to share a few tips for better Bash productivity. You will be surprised that not a single one of them is “Just install zsh”.

History searching

CTRL+R is cool, but you know what is even cooler? The ability to complete commands from history with up/down arrows. For example, enter cd, press up and it gets autocompleted with cd ~/your/last/directory/change/. This little snippet below must be put into ~/.inputrc and you are good to go.

"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set completion-ignore-case on

Execute previous command

This one is also history related, and I use it countless times every day. Use !! to get the most recent command. For example, sudo !! will execute your previous command as sudo. Also !$ can be handy, because it allows to re-use last parameter from previous command. I actually use an even quicker shortcut for this: ESC+.. However the shortcut may be terminal/OS dependant.

Jump between current and previous directory

Change your directory to the last directory you were in with a simple cd -. This way you can quickly switch between two working directories.

Display file size in a human readable format

If you have executed a command that returns files together with file sizes, there is a great chance, that adding -h option to the command will return the file sizes in a more readable format. Take for an example the good old ls -la. By default it returns file size in bytes. Just add “h” to the options ls -lah, and you have file sizes in megabytes.

Essential shortcuts

I hope that everyone nows about CTRL+arrows to jump between words, but there are a few other shortcuts that are as important as CTRL+arrows. Full list can be found online, e.g., on Wikipedia: Bash#Keyboard_shortcuts.

• CTRL+a jump to the beginning of line
• CTRL+e jump to to the end of line
• CTRL+w will delete a word backwards
• CTRL+z pause a command
• CTRL+l clear the screen
• CTRL+d exit current shell

Quickly transfer your key to a remote host for a password-less login

This is not a tip for every day situations, but occasionally it saves a few commands. Use ssh-copy-id user@remote_host to quickly copy the identity file to the remote host to enable password-less login. Passwords should be avoided for ssh anyway.