Section 4.7. Typing Shortcuts

4.7. Typing Shortcuts

If you've been following along with this tutorial at your terminal, you may be tired of typing the same things over and over. It can be particularly annoying when you make a mistake and have to start again. Here is where the shell really makes life easier. It doesn't make Unix as simple as a point-and-click interface, but it can help you work really fast in a command environment.

This section discusses command-line editing. The tips here work if your shell is bash, ksh, tcsh, or zsh. Command-line editing treats the last 50 or so lines you typed as a buffer in an editor (this is also called the command history). You can move around within these lines and change them the way you'd edit a document. Every time you press the Return key, the shell executes the current line.

4.7.1. Word Completion

First, let's try something simple that can save you a lot of time. Type the following, without pressing the Return key:

 $ cd /usr/inc 

Now press the Tab key. The shell will add lude to complete the name of the directory /usr/include. Now you can press the Return key, and the command will execute.

The criterion for specifying a filename is "minimal completion." Type just enough characters to distinguish a name from all the others in that directory. The shell can find the name and complete itup to and including a slash, if the name is a directory.

You can use completion on commands too. For instance, if you type:

 $ ema 

and press the Tab key, the shell will add the cs to make emacs (unless some other command in your path begins with ema).

What if multiple files match what you've typed? If they all start with the same characters, the shell completes the word up to the point where names differ. Beyond that, most shells do nothing. bash has a neat enhancement: if you press the Tab key twice, it displays all the possible completions. For instance, if you enter:

 $ cd /usr/l 

and press the Tab key twice, bash prints something like the following:

 lib         local 

zsh even goes a step further: if you press the Tab key yet another time, the first of the possible choices will be selected; if you press it yet again, the second is selected, and so on. This way, you can keep your finger on the Tab key and don't have to supply additional characters in order to disambiguate your entry.

4.7.2. Moving Around Among Commands

Press the up arrow, and the command you typed previously appears. The up arrow takes you back through the command history, and the down arrow takes you forward. If you want to change a character on the current line, use the left or right arrow keys.

As an example, suppose you tried to execute:

 $ mroe .bashrc bash: mroe: command not found 

Of course, you typed mroe instead of more. To correct the command, call it back by pressing the up arrow. Then press the left arrow until the cursor lies over the o in mroe. You could use the Backspace key to remove the o and r and retype them correctly. But here's an even neater shortcut: just press Ctrl-T. It will reverse o and r, and you can then press the Return key to execute the command.

Some shells even go a step further: if you type in a nonexistent command such as mroe, but there is a similar existing one, such as more, the shell will offer to correct your typing mistake and select this other option. Of course, before accepting this generous offer, you should first check what you are getting so that it is not a dangerous command that, for example, deletes your files.

Many other key combinations exist for command-line editing. But the basics shown here will help you quite a bit. If you learn the Emacs editor, you will find that most keys work the same way in the shell. And if you're a vi fan, you can set up your shell so that it uses vi key bindings instead of Emacs bindings. To do this in bash, ksh, or zsh, enter the command:

 $ export VISUAL=vi 

In tcsh, enter:

 $ setenv VISUAL vi