Useful Keystrokes

 Useful Keystrokes

While working from the command line, there are a few useful keystrokes that can help you with your session.

The following keystrokes are useful shortcuts at a shell prompt.

Keystroke	Action
[Ctrl]-[K]	While editing a command on the command line, this key combination deletes everything that has been typed in from the cursor's current position forward.
[Ctrl]-[D]	Pressing this key combination once ends the current application or process. Pressing it twice exits the shell.
[Ctrl]-[R]	At the command line, [Ctrl]-[R] searches through the command history to find the entry that starts with the letters you type.
[Ctrl]-[Z]	Suspends the current application. Entering bg after [Ctrl]-[Z] causes a program to run in the background.
[Ctrl]-[C]	"Kills" a program. This should be a last resort. Try stopping a program with other methods first.
[Ctrl]-[L]	Clears the terminal window.

Table  Useful shell prompt keystrokes

 

ere is a brief list of wildcards and regular expressions:

• * — Matches all characters

• ? — Matches one character

• \* — Matches the * character

• \? — Matches the ? character

• \) — Matches the ) character

•  Clearing and Resetting the Terminal

• The terminal window begins to look crowded very quickly. You can always exit from the terminal window and open a new one, but there is a quicker and easier way to remove the contents displayed in the terminal.

  To clear the terminal, enter the command clear at the shell prompt. The clear command clears the terminal, leaving only a new shell prompt at the top of the window.

  You can also clear the screen using the keystroke [Ctrl]-[L].

  Sometimes, you may accidentally open a program file or some other non-text file in a terminal window. When you close the file, you could find that the text you are typing does not match the output on the monitor.

  In such cases, enter reset to return the terminal window to its default values.