When you’re using the terminal in OS X, you’re usually using BASH, the Bourne-Again Shell. I’m occasionally surprised by long time terminal users who don’t know some of the following tips:

CTRL-A
        Jump to the start of the line
CTRL-E
        Jump to the end of the line
history
        Get a list of the last 500 commands typed
history | grep ssh
        Show a list of the last ssh commands you used
!script
        Run the last command you typed that began with script… (eg script/server -p 3100 -e production). Use this one with care - !rm can be a dangerous command
`backticks`
        Commands in backticks are evaluated first, and the result of the command is inserted into their place in the command. For example:
rm -rf `find . | grep svn`
        Removes all the .svn directories from your current directory
CTRL-L
        Clear the terminal screen
OPTION-K
        Clears the  scrollback history (this is an apple terminal command)
OPTION-T
        New Tab in the t apple terminal
tail -f log/production.log
        Follow a log (like cat, except stays open and displays new lines as they are written to a file)
CTRL-Z
        Pause the current process
bg
        Put a paused process into the background (same as running ./process &)
fg
        Brings a backgrounded process into the foreground again
grep term -B 2
        Greps a file for  ”term”, then displays the matching line and the two lines before it.

And when you’re working with files directly - these commands work in most versions of less or vim:

CTRL-B
        Page down
CTRL-D
        Page up
>
        Go to end of file
<
        Go to start of file
:123
        Go to line 123
/searchterm
        Searches for said term

If you use the terminal a lot, it’s definitely worth reading the bash reference and the advanced bash scripting guide. It’s one of those cases of a half hour spent reading saving you an hour per week.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.