Time-saving tips for Linux

The learning curve of vim was pretty steep, but once over the hump you get some massive benefits. That said, I bet I'm only using 1% of the available commands.<p>Going back to Windows makes you really appreciate the speed of bash, vim and grep.

I don't think these tips are that great. Some random criticisms:<p>ifconfig is deprecated (use "ip" instead).<p>There is not much value in knowing vim if you know Emacs. If you want to edit something in your terminal, well, emacsclient -t to your Emacs session. Or use mg, which is a very fast and light Emacs workalike -- just enough for editing your /etc/apt/sources.list to get Emacs installed :)

<i>Turn on sudo(8)'s "NOPASSWD" option for yourself (see sudoers(5)).</i><p>don't do that. if anything, lock it down even more by enabling tty_tickets.

"Learn what the number inside something like ls(1) or perror(3) means." you got me there, I don't know what it means and now I'm curious and can't find it on google

I found out about ack awhile back -- it's like grep on steroids.

When first stumbling my way around the shell, after learning about tab completion I discovered the magic wizardry that is command reverse/history lookup (cntrl-r start typing command ... see last command you entered that matches)

The 'learn bash, it's available everywhere' really bit me when I moved from being a Linux Sysadmin to an AIX Sysadmin. Only ksh is available in this case. It took quite a few months to get used to.

<i>If you are halfway through typing a command but change your mind, hit Ctrl-A, add a # at the beginning to make it a comment, and press enter. You can then return to it later via command history.</i><p>A faster way would be to hit Alt-# (does the same thing with just one key combo).

It's great seeing all of these commands and shortcuts, and seeing that you know a lot of them. These never cease to be useful.<p>Even though it seems simple to someone who knows Linux, you can always impress marketing/business people by flying through Linux with these helpful commands, shortcuts, and tips.

Another trick that I don't see people mention(excuse me if somebody here already did) is the bash history completion:<p>\esc \tab<p>This will complete based on your history, argument wise. Very useful when tab completion itself doesn't satisfy you.

"In bash, use Ctrl-R to search through command history."<p>Or, add these lines to your .bashrc to use Ctrl-p and Ctrl-n:<p>bind "\C-p":history-search-backward<p>bind "\C-n":history-search-forward

One thing that's definitely missing from that list is the "undo" feature of bash which is bound to Ctrl-/ by default. It reverts the last edit you did on the command line. (The keybinding invokes the undo action also in emacs.)

quora appears broken at the moment . . . I was going to suggest:<p>in many shells (bash, tcsh, etc), !foo will execute the most recent command from your history that matches foo, for example:<p><pre><code> &#62; grep -lots -of -options /complicated_regex/ ./some/path/* | /pipe/filter # realize you are in the wrong directory &#62; cd /the/right/directory &#62; !g </code></pre> and similarly, !! is the most recent command, which comes in handy for "sudo !!"[1]<p>[1] <a href="http://xkcd.com/149/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/149/</a>

One thing to say: <a href="http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml" rel="nofollow">http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml</a> It has everything I ever needed. When something is missing send patch.

<a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/</a> also have some good tips

Quick ssh and and start screen:<p><pre><code> function s() { ssh $1 -t screen -dRR }</code></pre>

It's odd that his 2nd tip is "Learn Vim" and then goes on to describe all the bash/readline keystrokes in Emacs mode.<p><pre><code> $ set -o vi</code></pre>