Bash Keyboard Shortcuts

In the past I have spent so much time using the mouse to navigate through directories and have largely avoided using the bash because I never really knew keyboard shortcuts that are used in bash. I have found myself to be much more productive when I use bash commands rather than navigating with my mouse. Here are a list of bash keyboard shortcuts that I find very useful. Some I use more than others, but this list is a good reference of the most common shortucts, taken from Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference . Even though they are listed as Ubuntu shortcuts, they are essentially the same for most operating systems based on the Linux kernel.

Key Combination	Description
Up/down cursor key	Scroll through command history
Ctrl+left/right cursor key	Move cursor from word to word
Tab	Autocomplete command or filename/path
Ctrl+A	Move to beginning of line
Ctrl+E	Move to end of line
Ctrl+W/Alt+Backspace	Delete word behind cursor
Alt+D	Delete word in front of cursor
Ctrl+U	Delete to beginning of line
Ctrl+K	Delete to end of line
Ctrl+Y	Restore text you’ve deleted
Ctrl+L	Clear screen (actually, this simply moves the prompt to the top of the screen; existing commands are still visible if the terminal window is scrolled)
Ctrl+C	Quit current program
Ctrl+Z	Switch current program to background
Ctrl+R	Search through command history
Ctrl+D	Logout (technically, terminate input)
Ctrl+T	Swap the two characters behind cursor

Using SCP from the command line

scp [-1246BCpqrv] [-c cipher] [-F ssh_config] [-i identity_file] [-l limit]
[-o ssh_option] [-P port] [-S program] [[user@]host1:]file1 …
[[user@]host2:]file2

Common options:

Options

-P   Specifies the port on which to connect to on the remote host.

-q   Quiet mode: Do not display the progress bar and warning and other diagnostic messages.

-r    Recursively copy entire directories.

-v   Prints debugging messages about their progress

Examples

To copy a local file to a remote host:
scp foo.txt myusername@host.server.com:/home/myusername/

To copy a directory from a remote host to the current directory in your machine.
scp -r myusername@host.server.com:myfiles/ .