Navigating the command line

There's a couple of useful tricks for navigating the command line that, while optional, will improve your quality of life. This section has a selection of those tricks.

Bash, by default, saves the history of your commands. It will even save the history across sessions. This can be extremely useful because sometimes we make a small mistake and don't want to retype an entire command, or we want to repeat the same commands over and over. To see your history, type this command:

history

The following is what you should see on running the preceding command:

You can see that there is a numbered list of output commands. To repeat a numbered command, you can use the bang character, !. !<number> will repeat the number command verbatim:

!10

The following is what you should see on running the preceding command:

A double bang, !!, will repeat the last command.

You can also cycle through the list of commands with the up and down arrow keys on the keyboard.

You can perform a reverse command search by typing Ctrl + R at an empty command line. Then begin typing some substring of a command you’d like to search for. Bash will attempt to find a matching command somewhere in your history. If multiple commands match, the last one will be picked, but you can cycle through the others by pressing Ctrl + R repeatedly.

cd - will take you back to the last directory you came from, even if it's halfway across the system.

A thing that confuses some people is hitting Ctrl + S. This will stop all output to a terminal session, and it will appear as if your session is frozen. To unfreeze the session, simply press  Ctrl + Q.