Here are some tricks to increase your productivity when using Linux.

Tab completion

Whenever you’re typing a command, if you hit <tab>, it will try to autocomplete the command. If nothing happens, try hitting it twice, to make it show you all the possibilities.

Circle through the history of commands with the arrow keys

This isn’t a Linux specific productivity habit, since it works in every operating system, but I felt that it belongs here.

You can use the “up” and “down” arrow keys to navigate through the history of commands.

If you want to search for a command you ran a long ago, you can hit ctrl+r and type some part of it.

Once you get the command, hit <tab>, <esc> or the arrow keys to edit it, or <enter> to run it.

Readline arguments

If you really want to know about this, check this out. If you want to repeat Z 10 times:

alt+1 0 Z

It will output ZZZZZZZZZZ

If you want to delete the next 5 characters:

alt+- 5 ctrl+d

It will output ZZZZZ

Redo the last command as root user

If you type a long command, and when you press enter you get a Permission denied error message, instead of hitting “up” and going to the start of the command to type “sudo”, you can run this instead:

sudo !!

Fix a really long command that you messed up in your favourite editor

If you realize that you have to fix major part of the last command that you typed, you can fix it in your favourite editor and run it with the command:

fc

Alternatively, you can use the following key combination:

ctrl+x+e

Don’t add command to the history

To do this you just need to append a space at the start of the command (note the space at the start):

 echo 'test'

Go to the previous directory

You can type the following command to go to the previous directory:

cd -

Write to file as root when using vim

Using vim, if you find yourself editting a file and when you try to write the changes you get a File not writable error message, you can do this:

:w !sudo tee %

Write to a file in between pipes

If you want to log a command to a file, at the same time as keeping the stdout, you can do this:

echo 'hola' | tee -a log.txt

Close a terminal but keep all the processes running

Let’s say that you have used the at command to program something but now you want to close the terminal. If you do so, the at command won’t work.

What you can do is make the process of the terminal disown all of its child processes with the command:

disown -a && exit

Reset a terminal that has gone crazy

Just type:

reset

Create multiple folders and subfolders

Let’s say that you wanted to create two directories with 5 folders inside each one. You can do so like this:

mkdir -p {one,two}/{1,2,3,4,5}

Note: The -p parameter is to tell mkdir to create the parent directory if it does not exist.

Quickly create a sequence of numbers

There are two main, quick ways of doing so:

{1..100}

seq 1 100

Quickly cut and yank part of the commands

Let’s say that you have a long command:

ls | tee -a files.txt | xargs ls -l | tee files-precise.txt | wc -l

And you want to only get this:

ls | tee -a files.txt
  • You can navigate to that position and hit ctrl+k to cut the text from there to the end of the line.
  • You can yank it back using ctrl+y.
  • If what you wan to do is cut from there to the start of the line you can hit ctrl+u
  • If you want to kill backwards, word by work, you can hit ctrl+w

Using less to view the last lines of a file (useful for logs)

Instead of using tail -f <file> you can use:

less +F <file>

This will start less at the end of the file.

  • If you want to be able to move up or down, you can hit ctrl+c.
  • If you want to attach less to the end of the file again, hit shift+f
  • If you didn’t run less +F, you can hit shitf+g to go to the end of the file.

Quickly access the arguments

You can hit atl+. to circle through the arguments used in previous commands instead of typing them.

This is useful, for example, if you typed a really long path to change directories.

Go to the beginning of the line

You can hit:

ctrl+a

And this will bring the cursor to the beginning of the line.

Piping the output of grep to less

In many situations you’ll find yourself grepping the output of a command, and sometimes it can be a little bit too much. You can pipe it to less so you can scroll up and down.

cat /var/log/dpkg.log | grep 'installed' | less

Searching for files or directories using find and grep

If you need to search for somthing you can use find and grep to do so.

Let’s say that you want to find a file named “secretFile”

find . -type f | grep 'secretFile'

Note: The first argument is the directory that contains what you want to search.

If you want to search for a directory named “secretDirectory”, you can do so like this:

find . -type d | grep 'secretDirectory'

Using the man pages

There are man pages for almost every command and for many system functions in Linux, so if you don’t know how to use some tool or C function, try using the man command.

If you don’t remember the name of the command you want to use, you can use man for that:

man -k compare strings

Use regular expressions

These are some of the most common flavours of regular expressions:

( )   -> Grouping
( | ) -> Grouping with or.
[]    -> Character classes.
*     -> Zero or more (lazy).
+     -> One or more (greedy).
.     -> Any character but newline.
$     -> End of line.
^     -> Beginning of line.

Use the search mode

When using less, you can hit / and enter the search mode.

Then, you can hit n and shift+n to go to the next or the previous occurrence of the text you searched.

Learn to solve a problem

  1. Understand the problem. Drawing is a good way to make this step easier. Trying to explain the problem to other person is a good way too.
  2. Divide the problem into smaller problems. Make a check list. Make sure the problems are small enough, don’t make them too big.
  3. If you get stuck, take it as a challenge.
  4. If all of this doesn’t work, try starting over. You don’t necessarily need to delete everything, you can comment everything.
  5. Practise allday everyday.

Run a command for each line of the output of another command

You just need to pipe the output into xargs <command>.

find . | grep .png | xargs ls -l

Use git for source control

If you dont know what git is, drop everything you’re doing right now and learn it immediately.