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Really useful command line help

The self hosting community collects many helpful shell commands and keyboard shortcuts here: selfh.st/command-line-corner

`ls` command

# list all files, including hidden ones
ls -al
ls -la

# list files, and sort by modification type (most recent first)
ls -lt
ls -tl

Keyboard Shortcuts

Clear the currently typed command, but save it for later pasting:

If you typed out a long command, but want to run something else first, but don’t want to lose what you’ve typed, you can use Ctrl-U, which saves what you’ve typed, and clears the current line so you can type out your other command. When you’re ready to run your original command, you can get it back by typing Ctrl-Y.

Ctrl-U - delete all text from the current line preceding the location of the cursor

Ctrl-Y - yank - Yank/paste wha was previously deleted via Ctrl-U or Ctrl-W into the shell

Other shortcuts

Ctrl-W - delete the previous word from the command line

Ctrl-P - cycle through the command line history

Ctrl-O - used as a shortcut to execute the command queued by Ctrl + P

Ctrl-K - delete everything from the current cursor position to the end of the line

Ctrl-R - search for a previously used command directly from the command line

Ctrl-L - instantly clear the terminal window while preserving any input on the current line

Alt-. - cycle through and reuse arguments from previous commands

Ctrl-x-e - opens up your $EDITOR to edit the current command you are typing. When you are done editing your command in your editor, save and close the editor to put the contents of your command back into the shell.

Ctrl-a / Ctrl-e - move the cursor to the start or end of the current line

Tiny Scripts

create filename with date time in it: handy script to quickly create a filename with date and time already in the name of the file. say you have a bunch of log lines in your clipboard, and you want to output it to a file that is timestamped, etc.

# usage: pbpaste > $(datetime-filename stuipd-audio.log)
# will paste contents into 2024-08-29_14-55-44-stupid-audio.log
function datetime-filename() {
  if [[ -z $1 ]]; then
    # send to stderr so it's not captured in output
    echo "What is the filename, with extension?" 1>&2
    read -r filename
  else
    filename=$1
  fi
  new_filename="$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S")-$filename"
  echo $new_filename
}