Boost Your bash Productivity with Alex Skorkin's Treasure Trove

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Unlock your terminal superpowers with these bash keyboard shortcuts—a curated list from Alan Skorkin’s classic post that every developer, sysadmin, or command-line ninja should know.

💡 Keyboard Shortcuts I Didn’t Know About

• Ctrl + K — Delete from cursor to end of command line
• Ctrl + U — Delete from cursor to start of command line
• Ctrl + W — Delete backwards one word
• Ctrl + Y — Paste text deleted by the most recent kill (yank)
• Ctrl + X, X — Toggle between cursor and start of command line
• Alt + B / Alt + F — Move backward/forward one word
• Alt + D — Delete from cursor to end of word
• Alt + C — Capitalize word and move cursor to end of it
• Alt + U — Uppercase from cursor to end of word
• Alt + L — Lowercase from cursor to end of word
• Alt + T — Swap current word with previous (SO COOL!)
• Alt + . — Insert last word of previous command

🧙‍♂️ Bash History Expansion Magic

• !blah:p — Print the command that !blah would run (without executing it)
• !* — Expand to all arguments from previous command (excluding command name)
• !!:s/foo/bar — Rerun the last command, but substitute foo with bar

📘 Bonus: Tips from the Linux Foundation’s EDX Course

More terminal wizardry from this_

📘 But wait, what if bash doesn't have the command you need?

That's when you turn to the solution from the oracle. Example? I want to delete from cursor to next whitespace.