Interesting Linux Command Line Tricks

Shortcuts

Go to the beginning of a line: ctrl-a Search for your prior commands: ctrl-r

Quick history information:

alias h='history' alias hg='history | grep --color=auto'

Keep an eye on your local network:

alias LAN='nmap -sn 192.168.1.* | grep report'

Monitor your system logs:

alias LOG='tail -f /var/log/*log /var/log/*/*log'

Add to your ~/.bashrc HISTFILESIZE= some number to increase that

If you forget to run a command with sudo, just type sudo !! and you will rerun that prior command with sudo.

You can also do this with a quick alias:

alias please='sudo $(history -p \!\!)'

If you have python3 installed on your system, you can quickly make a simple webserver that you can access via http.

python3 -m http.server

It gets servered to http://localhost:8000, so keep that in mind.

Edit the ~/.ssh/config to save information about some of the hosts that you typically connect to.

Host tasker
   HostName someserver.example.com
   Port 7000
   UserName admin

Then you can just ssh into that machine with ssh tasker, instead of ssh admin@someserver.example.com -p 7000.

You can repeat with all your hosts that you can connect to.

To create a few files with the same/similar names, you can use the following:

touch output{0,1,2,}.txt

This will create the following files * output0.txt * output1.txt * output2.txt * output.txt

The last one is because I left the trailing , in the curly braces.

This one is very similar to above. If you have a file that you just want to put a .bak extention on:

cp file.txt{,.bak}

This will keep the original file.txt and create a quick backup as file.txt.bak.