18 Commands That Will Change The Way You Use Linux Forever

When it comes to using Linux, there's usually a few ways to accomplish a task. Here are eighteen commands that will change the way you use Linux forever. Whether you're a Linux newbie or a seasoned SysAdmin, you'll find this video helpful. Presented by @LearnLinuxTV
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:38 Navigating Directories
2:02 Clearing the Terminal
3:48 Navigating Directories with a Different Tool
5:45 Minimizing an App
7:36 Restoring an App
8:44 Repeating the Last Command with sudo
10:03 Review the Command History
11:28 A Better Way to Run Previous Commands
13:21 Making Previous History Search Even Better With Timestamps
17:07 Take the Blue Pill
19:17 Adjust Font Size
20:17 Clearing a Line
20:51 Moving to the Front of the Line
21:10 Moving to the End of the Line
22:03 Chaining Commands Together
25:49 Tailing Files
26:41 Truncating Files
28:03 Using the Column Command
29:13 Conclusion
New to Cloud Computing? Get started here with a $100 credit → www.linode.com/lp/youtube-vie...
Read the doc for more information on using the Linode CLI→ www.linode.com/docs/guides/li...
Learn more about the Linode CLI→ www.linode.com/products/cli/
Subscribe to get notified of new episodes as they come out → kzbin.info?sub_co...
#Linode #Linux #CommandLine #AlternativeCloud
Product: Linode, Command Line Interface; @LearnLinuxTV ;

[@scotty3114]

I am a 78 yr old retired field tech from a Mirosoft and Novell background. With Microsoft shenanigans, I decided to move to Linux, it's been a steep learning curve but I enjoy it. This is the first time I've seen one of your vids. I think its great that you are teaching these tricks! Thank you so much. I'll be subscribing.

[@AlazTetik]

You spot the right place to learn more about Linux!

[@Apbdla]

🙏

[@patrickvanrinsvelt4466]

Scotty, same here with the Windows requirements. My boy's laptop has been running KDE Neon for 2 years now with no issue. I just moved the work laptop to KDE as a test with their new release. The 3-4 work PCs get moved in 6 months. We are web devs so most of our stuff is out in the cloud already. Libre Office, GIMP, Bootstrap Studio are our desktop apps. I tested many distros and KDE Neon, built on Ubuntu, is beautiful, solid and fast. One of the old work/test PCs is a dual core, 2GB of memory and runs Neon just fine.

[@TheExard3k]

dont forget to check out his channel learnlinuxTV. I learned a lot myself and feel confident in using Linux now, which is great and fun

[@PaulFWatts]

@@patrickvanrinsvelt4466 Thanks for the tip re Boostrap Studio. As I'm more of a back-end developer this is great for doing a quick front-end without having to become an expert on the front-end.

[@dorb1337]

summary of the commands: 1. `cd -` : back to the last directory we've been to. 2. `ctrl+l`: clear screen 3. `reset`: clear on steroids - resets terminal session 4. `pushd /var` + few other `cd` commands + `popd`: commands that allow you to work with directory stack and change the current working directory 5. `vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config` + ctrl+fz : isn't closing, but minimizing the window to the back ground `fg` : bring back the window to the front. 6. `apt update`: would fail - cuz we fogot sudo `sudo !!` : would run the last command as sudo 7. 8. run command that already been run - `history`, choose a number of command and run it `!102` -> the 102 command from the history would run again 9.HISTTIMEFORMAT="%Y-%m-%d %T" `history` would should the history commands by the format. another way to add the format, is add it to the `~/.bashrc` file with `vim` or `nano` commands. 10.cmatrix -> let you look cool + ctrl c to escape 11.adjust font `shift +` or `shift -`, `reset` command would reset the font size 12. `ctrl a` - start of the line `ctrl e` - end of the line 13.chainning commands -> `ls -l; echo "hello" ` or -> `ls -l && echo "hello" ` && - would stop when meets an error ; - would pop up an error and keep on running the second/next command 14. `tail` / `head` commands to see top or bottom of a file. 15. truncate (be cautious while using this one - its risky) it allows to change the size of a very large files (like log files) for example `truncate -s ` == truncate -s 0 hello.txt to empty the hello.txt file 16. `mount | column -t` : make sure all the output shows in columns any verbose and messy command output would look better using `| column -t`

[@bidenisasnake9932]

17: shut down and use the phone instead.

[@sisayfekadu8158]

5. Not ctrl+fz, rather ctrl+z

[@poweredbyfruit]

Thanks for saving me the time

[@alap1983]

THIS must be a pinned comment

[@salvadorestrella8]

`ctrl u` to clear the current prompt line

[@RamiroRela]

25+ years of command line advanced usage but with your video I learned about column -t and the history time variable

[@martendolk8692]

I use the "watch" command a lot for ad hoc progress monitoring. Also, to get to the home directory you only need to type "cd" no need for "cd ~". Cheers!

[@jgm113]

Or just ~

[@twice4846]

@@jgm113 no

[@jgm113]

@@twice4846 YES

[@mootal2202]

@Jack Warner Not right. Cd taskes you to the Home directory for current user.

[@wheeI]

'cd' instead of 'cd ~' might me a bashism, not sure

[@psionski]

7:50 after ctrl + Z, the process is frozen, but you can type “bg” to make it continue running in the background. I use this all the time when e.g. I start some NodeJS service interactively, to see the messages, and then ctrl + Z, bg, enter, to turn it into a background process (and you can even exit the shell and it’s fine, it will continue running).

[@kendarr]

This is really cool.

[@banjohead66]

Also after Ctrl-Z, the command "jobs" will list out all backgrounded jobs with an index value to the left of each. If you wanted to bring the backgrounded job with the index value of "2" to the foreground, you may do so with the command "fg 2".

[@moormanjean5636]

@@banjohead66 or with just "% 2"

[@TheEmrobe]

"(and you can even exit the shell and it’s fine, it will continue running)" This is technically not true (in most cases). If your shell is killed, it will kill the process attached to it by SIGHUP. You can get around this by using 'disown' or 'nohup'.

[@samieb4712]

THATS what bg does ?? oh man that's useful lmao

[@OCKev]

Good stuff! I learned a couple things! Regarding history, one other trick I do all the time is to re-execute the last command starting with a certain string. For example, !sudo will execute the last command in the history that started with "sudo". If you're not sure what that command is and want to see it before you execute it, you can type : !sudo :p The :p means preview the command but don't actually execute it (but it will add it to the history as if you had executed that command). If it's what you wanted to do, you can then just type !! and it will execute that command. And another trick I do all the time because of my clumsy typing is to quickly fix a typo and execute the previous command in one step using the caret ^ symbol. For example, if I type : sudp some really long intricate command I will get the error that sudp does not exist - oops, I meant to type sudo. All I have to do is type : ^sudp^sudo and it will reissue my previous command, replacing the first instance of "sudp" with "sudo". If you wanted to be really lazy, you could also type : ^p^o and it just replaces the first occurrence of "p" with "o"

[@g.t.3482]

Wow! 👌

[@rakemup]

Is there a way to delete a line from the history file? i.e. "del !999" to remove line 999 from history

[@OCKev]

@@rakemup Good question, not that I know of.

[@geoffjball]

@@rakemup `history -d linenumber` should do it if you’re in bash. In ZSH I believe you need to exit the shell and then edit it out of ~/.zsh_history.

[@jagadhiswarreddy3661]

@@rakemup ​ @Geoff Ball but your del command will be printed in history if you use del!999

[@gronblom]

CTRL U does remove the text on the line, if you are at the end of the line. What it is actually doing is removing from your cursor to the BEGINNING of the line. If you are in the middle of the line, it will remove everything BEFORE the cursor. Also, if you are in the middle of the line and type CTRL K, it will remove everything from the cursor to the END of the line. If you do CTRL A CTRL K, it is the same as CTRL U as you are going to the beginning and removing text to the end of the line. truncate was a new command for me (I've used 'cat /dev/null > filetoempty') and I learned about column, too! Cool video!

[@laxmanapolisetti]

along with 'ctrl a' and 'ctrl e', I use 'alt b' and 'alt f' for jumping backward and forward by word. This always helps if I need to jump to the middle of a very long command. 'alt leftarrow' and 'alt rightarrow' works similarly tooo. Also by the way all the linux short cuts also works with youtube video as well. Try it :) j - takes you 10 seconds backwards k - pause l - takes you 10 seconds forwards uparrow and downarrow increases volume f - fullscreen c - captions on (if available) m - for mute there are many shortcuts for youtube as well.

[@toddtroll2220]

Or set your shell in vi mode by using "set -o vi" and then use most of vim's movement commands after pressing Esc.

[@iceman8075]

Those are emacs shortcuts. They work everywhere.

[@mstorgaardnielsen]

I use ctrl-k ctrl-y kill/yank often

[@rosarioagro1699]

you can see each frame of the paused video by pressing < or > (actually these are comma and dot)

[@dimaj1]

I am not sure if this is my shell/terminal app config, but pressing Esc followed by Backspace deletes from cursor position until beginning of word. I use it extensively in combination with alt+b

[@ghillan72]

1) the " truncate" command to clean the content of a file is pointless. If you want to delete the content of a file you " could" do with echo "" > /file_path/filename, but you can even skip the echo command. Just issue "> /file_path/filename" without the echo works and its much faster. 2) Ok mentioning ctrl +a and ctrl +e , but actually the keys "home" and "end" on your keyboard actually do the same. ( i use those) 3) A command i really like but is quite unkonwn is "tac" ( is like cat in reverse), and it's a "cat" command that reads a file bottom-up. Its quite usefull then you want to read a log file without knowwing how many lines to include. as example: tac /var/log/messages | more you read the logs starting with the most recent line and you can keep going backwards until you find what you are looking for.

[@JasonSFuller]

Came here to mention your #1 and #2. Faster than typing out "truncate." Bonus tip: When you're 5 servers deep in SSH sessions, use +D (on an empty line) instead of typing "exit" to end a session.

[@il5083]

I just appreciate you record and upload this in 4k so the text is so crisp, this makes me happy.

[@paulgriffin8566]

Jay, many thanks for a wonderful set of tips. Like many I have a grab bag of commands that I have picked up the the years to make life easier. These 18 little gems are fantastic. Many thanks. My favourite is CTRL Z and then return with fg. The number of times I have been in vi and need to quickly jump out and in, sometimes I'm to lazy to start another terminal session, this little trick solves that problem.

[@BradleyBrown]

Thanks for doing this! I've been using Linux off and on for over 20 years and thought I knew my way around pretty well, and I learned a ton!

[@GglSux]

Thanks for another great video. One small side note, the "ctrl+u" will ((at least on my "Pop-OS 21-04")) indeed work as You demonstrated. How ever what it "really does" is "deletes" all the entered text to the left of the cursor. So if the cursor is "at the end" of the line it will indeed "delete the full line", but if the cursor instead is at the start it will do nothing. And of course if You have the cursor "somewhere in the middle" it will just "delete" the text to the left of the cursor Just thought I'd mention that (possibly petty) detail :) Best regards.

[@erikisberg3886]

Thanks, many good tips! I agree that You can go long way doing things inefficiently by routine. It is well worth taking time to learn an adequate set of tools for the job. Problem is that the possibilities available are sort of overwhelming, so tutorials like this are really valuable. 👍

[@Crackalacking_Z]

One the subject of pushing things in the background with crtl+z, there is wonderful tool called "screen". It's a terminal session that always runs in the background once started, even when you logout of the system. You can simply detach and re-attach whenever you need. It's a relic of times when terminal connections were not super reliable, like over dial up. In case of a connection drop, one could just re-login, re-attach screen and continue as if nothing happened.

[@mikebrooker8800]

tmux is another

[@jeisonsanchez4842]

I used to use “screen” to maintain a session of the BitchX irc client.

[@shobhitnirala5328]

screen discont.. in redhat 8 :(

[@shajidkhan9288]

9

[@kenkkash]

Thanks 🙏 for the video. I learned 3 Linux commands from it. pushd / popd / truncate Ctrl + w delete word by word.

[@DavidJSullivan8]

Love your work Jay. You are an excellent presenter. Thank you.

[@JayantBB78]

As usual, great video for beginners. 👍! Keep it up.

[@williamevans6830]

Awesome video the column command and history navigation was especially helpful thanks again.

[@null1023]

Nice video! There's some good stuff in here I've not seen, like logging timestamps for commands in the history. 6:14 "^Z doesn't work with nano, I don't know why" Yeah, this one hit me a few times on some systems. Turns out, nano actually intercepts it depending on the configuration. If you want it to work, you can run nano with the -z option, or you can add 'set suspend' to your ~/.nanorc file.

[@hermi362]

I like to use ESC followed by . (period) This key combination will insert the last argument of the previous command at the cursor position. This is very useful when you've entered a long filename at the end of a command (which is common) and now you want to apply another command to that same file. You can keep pressing ESC, period to access the last argument of previous commands.

[@volanahu5916]

Alt + '.' does this too

[@jonathantx]

Awesome content, like always. Thank you for not forgetting the beginners like me.

[@olamidewilliams7670]

you simply have one of the most concise, eloquent and knowledge impacting channel. thank you, sir!

[@dimrspflo]

use tail -F instead of -f (same as --follow plus nice --retry) It makes tail reading consistent the file even though the file rotates and a new file (with the same name of course) has been created

[@6bOemH2gKz]

try "less +F"

[@da001be]

Exrtremely useful! Thanks so much. Always learn a lot from your videos!

[@T313COmun1s7]

I have two that I have found to be very useful. - If you have a large amount of work, and you just need it to go away you can type: exit - If you need to create a large amount of work for somebody else to get them off your back on why you are not doing anything you can SSH into a server and type: shutdown -h now

[@tuckertucker1]

The laugh factory called... you've been fired.

[@gblargg]

And if you need a day of work: sudo rm -rf /, or alternately, sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

[@japes789]

cd - and column are game changers thanks for sharing Another one I like which isn't mentioned here is the alias command (written into the .rc file for persistence is a huge time saver for example alias dist-update="sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade-distro" Will run those commands every time you type dist-update into the terminal

[@kychemclass5850]

Thank you Jay (+ Linode for sponsoring things). Love these things.

[@willyme2]

Running a previous command is much easier when you can type the start of the command then press up/down arrow to find all matching commands. So just like MATLAB or other languages. This can be done by creating the file ".inputrc" in your home directory. Populate the file with the lines: " "\e[A":history-search-backward " and: " "\e[B":history-search-forward " - do ignore the outside quotes. Now after you restart the shell you will get up/down arrows that search your command history.

[@maharajahdann]

I love you

[@BB-uz4tc]

I love this channel im so grateful for it. Thanks for making me better.

[@chrisodillman3355]

wow thank you so much!! Im still a novice in linux and only need to use it to rsync/wget stuff on webservers. i am half way through your video and i absolutly love what you are teaching here.. this is so much fun!!

[@ReivecS]

I haven't seen much on this channel so maybe you already covered this but mastering the 'screen' command is a must have skill if you are doing any remote work on linux systems. It just takes one DC during a long task to make you appreciate the value of running long tasks in a dedicated screen so that you don't have to start over.

[@alpheusmadsen8485]

I would throw in "tmux" as an option, too! It's a "modern" version of screen, but both allow you to do amazing things, above and beyond running tasks even when your connection is cut (which is the reason I was introduced to "screen" in the first place). Theoretically, I'd use tmux on my local machine and screen on a remote terminal, but in practice, I haven't done much remote work in recent years, so I mostly just use tmux.

[@doodahgurlie]

Really great video. I knew a lot of the stuff from years ago, but you also still showed a few more things that I didn't even know was possible.

[@cwmoser]

Very good video on the command line. I'm 75 and grew up with UNIX while working with Bell Labs and developing software using C. I've been to a number of Unix Administration schools while working at Western Electric including Unix Internals. Back then there was no GUI and it was all command line interface on the terminal. I still have vi highly ingrained in me and today only use Ubuntu Linux. I really enjoyed your video and picked up a lot of new tips and some that shucked the old cobwebs into remembering. Thanks for the very well done video.

[@nischalstha9]

Just made my beginner life lot easier in linux!❤️‍🔥

[@ComicswithDrew]

This just might be the single greatest video I've ever watched in KZbin.

[@mitchellperry9399]

Good video, lots of useful things here, only a few things I feel need pointing out/including along with similar topics. Not sure if this will have been said but where Ctrl+Z is being mentioned using the word "background" would be confusing terminology (this point will become clear very soon), Ctrl+Z as the terminal returns is stopping the process, `fg` will foreground it but typing `bg` will actually then allow it to remain running without its output being displayed, similar to running with `&` when initially running the command, thereby actually running in the background, background jobs will still be killed when the terminal is closed and can be viewed using the command `jobs -l` and resumed by running `fg %X` where X is the number listed in square brackets by `jobs -l`. I personally use this for copy operations I don't need to monitor but will take a couple of hours, whilst working on other things. Where && is used to mean run command only if success || can be used to run only if failure. `tail -f | grep ` also works on all systems I've used which can be very useful if you have busy log files and only certain things you want to see (or not see if you include the -v flag of grep).

[@av1654]

Superb! Very informative and crystal clear 👍

[@markgentry8675]

column is a great tip. ive been using linux for years and i didnt known it. thanks. btw i really like you clean and clear style. its very easy to watch

[@chriskaprys]

Love these tips! Adding to your Ctrl + shortcuts, I often use Ctrl + W to erase the whole "word" left of the cursor. (Delimiters for what counts as a "word" is set in a file, I forget where; also affects what gets selected when you double-click on text.) After many years fooling around / learning in bash, I only recently started putting those ".." to good use, to backup and reenter a path tree at a different point. e.g. I'm in /etc/ssl/certs and want to get to /etc/snmp I used to type 'cd ..' 'cd ..' 'cd snmp' But now just use 'cd ../../snmp'

[@monstroPT]

Very useful tips! Thanks, Jay!

[@nemonada3501]

Awesome video, always looking for more stuff to learn to use the terminal. One day I might actually be able to call myself a "power user". Thanks heaps, extremely helpful.

[@nishan_nb]

Thanks for the great video. That cmatrix command and F11 is really cool! And of course all your other tips.

[@MrWolfSndz]

We can also use Ctrl+w to delete word by word in a long command where as Ctrl+u removes the whole command. Thank you for your video 🙂

[@jaycoleman1143]

I hate to say this but many of the tutorials out there, the folks talking are hard to understand. I know that sounds bad, but it's a real issue either way. I greatly appreciate that you are in depth and easy to listen/hear. Thank you very much.

[@martinb9208]

Excellent! Works really well on my MAcBook and various Linux VM's

[@incrediblez394]

Great demo. Just started using the OS. Very helpful.

[@Chemasaurus]

Gosh, a couple reminders here. Things I've learned but never used enough to remember. One thing I think you could have included in the last section (column) was holding ALT while click+dragging can allow you to highlight (and copy) just the contents of a single column or multiple columns (without highlighting the entire line). This trick has been a life saver for me when I have a bunch of columns and I don't want to spend 15 seconds writing out a command to extract just the one column.

[@piratk]

I use curly brackets a lot, they allow for neat rename and other things. mv my_{first,second} And it will rename my_first to my_second. To understand a command expansion better, prepend the line with echo, and add more to the brackets, to see what happened before the line was executed.

[@jerrylindner9494]

In this last half hour I have learned more strait and to the point as well as very usefull stuff that was lacking in my scope of knowledge. Yet it did take me longer to get through it. I just had to try this stuff along the way. It really filled in some gaps as to dealing with the file system. I will find this information very usefull for my projects. My THANKS.

[@noscreadur]

One of the most illuminating vids I've seen for ages!

[@ogcurated]

"History | less" and the "!#" are a timesaver!!!! Can't forget "ctrl+c" or "ctrl+z" when stuck,.. lol Thank you for all the work and time you put into these videos!

[@rodrigogimenez2430]

It's very clear, even to a person who is learning english. Very thanks, new subscriptor from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Cheers!

[@pagarb]

This is a very good video, it's a great time saving refresher with simple explanations

[@albertoleo9529]

Another great video. There is always something interesting to learn with you, Jay! Very helpful, easy and clearly explained as usual! I liked the history command. I was also curious how to permanently delete the terminal commands history automatically on shutdown

[@blackchristiangeek]

Thanks for these tips that seem so basic, yet I have been using Linux for years and had never heard of some of these. Again, thanks, and God bless.

[@tannenguitar]

Finally some really helpful shell video! Great channel, great content! Very useful practical tips/tricks

[@gwgux]

I don't know how useful it would be everyone, but one of the CLI tricks I do is install lsd (ls deluxe) and then alias ls to lsd in my shell's rc which which replaces ls to lsd. This gives me a more colorful listing output than the default ls command. I find it useful for times when I'm in the middle of project and it's late at night and I'm tired and hungry and that's when seeing the traditional output all starts to blur together from fatigue. The lsd output is in the same format as traditional ls, but has more color coding and if you have the right fonts enabled, will display little icons for the files and directories right withing the terminal session for you. It helps me out when things blurring together and it also looks cool so it's something I recommend people look at as they learn the terminal a bit more.

[@minecraftchest1]

I'll have to give it a look.

[@ingokrispin3482]

If you like "lsd" you'll might want to take a look at "exa". It's very similar but even more powerful, and it's in most distributions' repos.

[@gwgux]

@@ingokrispin3482 Thanks, I'm looking into it now! ;)

[@nateb1804]

"tail -f " to live-monitor new content in a file was a new trick for me, thanks!

[@mechwarrior83]

Great video! I have been using Linux for 3 years and come from a Windows admin background but this old dog still managed to learn some new tricks.

[@noam65]

Some I knew, some more I didn't. Thanks for adding to my toolbox.

[@user-vi1tw1xw7r]

Actually a bit surprised at how much useful new stuff I got out of this, I've been a linux user for 10-11 years.Thanks.

[@nagalokeshkanumoori7822]

ctrl + l(clear screen shortcut), minimize/maximize, and history time are my favorite ones :)

[@WorldWorrier3273]

Thanks for your shortcuts, it's really really Helpful for 🙋.

[@DavidUndernehr]

Nice, used the ; chaining two CMDs to see how my Memory and CPU is doing in a compact view # CMDs connected together to show how my CPU and Memory is currently doing ps -eo comm,pcpu --sort -pcpu | head -5; ps -eo comm,pmem --sort -pmem | head -5 I just added this to a .sh script so I can run it quickly when needed. Keep up the good work!

[@cypher3905]

You may use aliases instead of scripts for this kind of stuff. Aliases are so underrated but it's by far what I use the most when I want a command to be accessed easily

[@KodornaRocks]

Instead of 'cd ~' use 'cd' without arguments

[@neverendingcoralmaze]

Thank you for these valuable, time-tested tips and tricks!

[@cubbyv]

I haven't finished watching the video but I'm constantly exclaiming 'Ohh!' and 'Ahhh!'. Thank you.

[@Songfugel]

Ok, one minute in, and already the first tip blew my mind and made the video worth a like

[@andresberger6240]

I didn't knew most of this tricks, some of them are super useful. Many thanks

[@lasol2474]

I learnt CTRL+u today. I used to do CTRL+a and then CTRL+k. Good tip. Thanks!

[@steakdaddy925]

Great video. I learned a bunch. new subscriber. video length and content was perfect.

[@nianpingxia6496]

Thank you for your share! along with ctrl a,e ,ctrl k will delete the right content of cursor, ctrl u will delete the left content of cursor,ctrl y will paste what you delete,ctrl w will delete by word.I think the use much like VIM editor.

[@dtpr0]

Thank you and appreciate your input to this world!

[@AlfredoVicente83]

instead of using "tail -f filename" I like using "less filename" and then shift+F, to force feed and update output as the file being updated. The advantage is that if I see something I need to troubleshoot or to go up and search for a keyword that draw my attention, I can do so right away while inside the "less" command. Even better I can do "less filename" search for the keyword, then do "shift+f" and if the keyword does show up while its feeding the content to the screen it will be immediately highlighted .

[@chantron]

thanks for this! i learned a few new tricks. i have been using linux since 2006 and never knew about "!!"

[@BonelessEar]

you can also chain commands by using || (pipes) and it will do the opposite of &&. It will run second command only if the first one failed. Another cool command line tool I use A LOT is "screen". Its a console windows manager that allows you have multiple consoles *running*, switch between, split screen and many more. Most cool about screen is that you can detach from it (ctrl+a D D), log out from system, log back in and attach back to it "screen -DR" and continue where you left.

[@gblargg]

I think of command && another as saying that they must both run successfully. command || another says that one or the other needs to be successful. It follows the same rules as in C and C++ regarding evaluation, where the second won't be executed unless necessary (i.e. in the && case, only if the first works, and in the second case, only if the first fails).

[@TheMgaertne]

Not sure whether someone else mentioned that, but instead of tail -f I use less and press Shift-f to follow a file for some time. If something jumps to my attention, I can Ctrl-Z out of the follow mode, and go back to that line. You can also search with / for some particular errors, and they will be highlighted in follow mode, or use &search-string to just show the matching lines for your regex search in there.

[@comparedtowhat2549]

My favorite is using TAB to autocomplete whatever I started to type. This seems to work for any command and any argument to a command, no matter what command. I was surprised you did not mention this as if it would be common knowledge not worth mentioning. It was not for me and I've seen lots of water pass under bridges. Someone else commented about using TAB here but in such an obscure context that one might not notice it or realize what TAB will do. I would say I never fully type in any command or argument knowing full well a simple TAB press will complete what I started. This is particularly useful when dealing with directory names.

[@tomate3391]

For the sake of completeness: autocomplete is great, but it is not always out of the box activated. In this case it has to be activated.

[@pieterrossouw8596]

Nice. I never knew about the the Ctrl Z / fg functionality but I've needed it plenty of times.

[@rahilarious]

use tmux

[@coryfriend8325]

Just a note here ctrl z doesn't put the process into the background it interrupts it, which pauses execution. If you want the process to run in the background you can type bg after interrupting with ctrl z. This allows the process to RUN in the background. fg will still retrieve it from the background.

[@richtraube2241]

Yo! Same here. And it's usually just for a quick pop out of a screen editor. Tmux is overkill for that.

[@laffinkippah]

Great tips. One of my favorites, not mentioned in the video is using Ctrl+x, Ctrl+e to edit complex commands and then execute them.

[@N2AIE]

Brand newbie. And jumping into Linux. This does help, I’ll watch again and take some notes..I have a project I’ll need to build so there are some commands that I’ll be using thanks

[@vimalneha]

Excellent collection and many thanks for showing us!

[@aram5642]

I love these shortcuts and history tips! When it comes to terminals (I work on Win and mac), every time I need to do something "non-standard" around cli, I am like a child lost in the woods, and always need help from google. I wish I had received a primer on terminals like all those bashrc, bash_profile stuff, how to deal with other terminal like ohmyzsh or fish, which configuration files they use, etc.

[@ghazanvieee]

column -t is the new help for me. Thanks!

[@albert3407]

what I've learned watching this video is that when i press Ctrl+z push the current process in background and to put it back again i have to run fg that stands for ForGround, Was also very useful the use of !! used to run the last command in case i do mistakes missing the sudo word, I find very useful to use && instead ; has chaining command, other two very useful command that are not shown her are ctrl+n and ctrl+p

[@PapaBear102]

Loved the video, definitely learned a new one with the !# trick for commands. I was expecting you to mention ctrl-y when talking about the ctrl-u shortcut. Ctrl-U: Cut from cursor to beginning of line, Ctrl-Y: Paste previously cut content. Another copy/paste trick instead of right-clicking: Ctrl-Shift-C: Copy highlighted text, Ctrl-Shift-V: Paste copied text. Another thing I wished I had learned sooner was: Tmux (multiple terminal windows in one)

[@meneerjansen00]

Again, some tips I din't know about after using Linux as my daily OS for 15 years! Thanks. :)

[@estudiordl]

Same! Awesome tutorial! 😁

[@polliluiz]

Same here.

[@WR250a]

another useful shortcut is ctrl +right/left arrow . this will (mostly) tab back through the command by the word. EX: you typed a command like "while read file;do a=$(tr [A-Z] [a-z]) ;ehco "$a" >> newfile.txt < file.txt;done" note echo is misspelled, so you hit up arrow to bring the command back up, and hit ctrl+left arrow to go back and correct the spelling. ctrl+right moves one word to the right and ctrl+left goes left by one word. also the end key goes to the end of the line and the home key takes you to the beginning.

[@rasraster]

I love all of you vids. Thanks for your work!

[@alpheusmadsen8485]

I ended up watching this video because I'm looking for a video that describes how to use "unison", and I hoped that there was something in the video about unison. While I didn't see that, I nonetheless appreciate the video, even if I didn't learn much of anything new. I fully endorse it! These are good commands to be familiar with! While I have specific reasons to be interested in unison, knowing how to use "scp" and "rsync" are certainly valuable, too!

[@maxper75]

Good video, don't know if anyone already pointed out that ctl+z doesn't send the process in three background but the process gets suspended, which means that it will not be scheduled any more, up till you execute fg or bg. The first command sends as your showed up the app to own again the stdin, stdout and stderr, while there other sends the command to the background, writing anyway to stdout and stderr.

[@alainbelisle4543]

Learned a few things today, thank you 😊

[@apacheaccountant9757]

My best youtube recommended video so far

[@kbsiva]

Very nice video. Reminded me to look for smarter ways of working on the command line. Ctrl-L, Ctrl-U and ! will definitely save me time. Loved the tail and column commands too.

[@zinsy23]

I've seen a lot of command line trick videos, and most of them I'd already heard of. I'd maybe learn a couple things here or there, but this video, I hardly knew anything mentioned or didn't remember a few off the top of my head! This is probably my favorite command line tricks video by far! Some that I also didn't fully understand make more sense now to where I feel like I can use it! I see myself likely using !# with the history command and ctrl + r the most now.

[@zoolkhan]

working with linux since ages... but there were a number of useful tricks here i never knew or could not be bothered with at the time. thanks for bringing this back to my attantion, in hindsight its a shame i never used so many of those little things before

[@thefluentone]

format the history time was probably my favorite. at work one of the commands I use a lot when debugging a problem is pushd and popd. Usually it is a scenario when I am working on some directory and whatever goes wrong and I need to hop around and explore the system to track a file path down to add to a script or looking for a log file etc. so I pushd to go to what I am looking for and once I have it popd to get back to my working dir.

[@NewJayqwe2]

This is fantastic Jay, subscribed

[@TheSulross]

on the last item of piping output into column -t, I find that very long lines of text that line wrap are confusing to read so I additionally pipe output into less -S where -S option turns off line wrapping. If producing text with embedded terminal escape codes for setting colors on text strings, then can use -R with less command as it will then interpret those escape codes and text will be displayed with intended colors applied. So this allows for making some rather spiffy output that draws attention to headers, use red for errors and green for success, etc