Many people don’t think of their command prompt as a particularly useful thing, or even pay it much attention. To me, this is a bit of a shame, as a useful prompt can change the way you use the command line.

Scripts are files that contain shell commands which may be short or can be very complex. Scripts just make it easier because you can invoke one command to run all of the commands in the script. Here instead of using 8 separate commands you can use one command to execute all of them.

I find that a little color on the command line helps make things easier to read. ls is easy to colorize: just add the line...

A shell is a program that acts as an intermediary between the user and the Linux kernel. The shell receives commands from the user through typed words and passes them into the kernel for processing. The kernel has the ability to communicate with hardware and gather resources like files and memory. The most common shell is bash.

This article is a continuation to my other Bash-related post, 6 Bash Productivity Tips. Since that article gathered many useful comments and I bumped into several more over the net, here are 5 more tips and tricks. Although these may not be necessarily productivity-related, they will surely ease working in a Bash terminal and it may be worth knowing them.

1. Use !!
Typing !! followed by Enter will bring back and execute the last command (same as Ctrl+P followed by Enter).

"This post sets a challenge; the goal is to come up with a bash one-liner (which can include multiple statements, pipes, etc. to arbitrary level) which removes "incriminating" lines from the .bash_history file, without looking too incriminating itself [...] feel free to leave your offerings in comments to this post..."

A shell is a command interpreter which allows the user to interact with the computer. The way things work is simple: the user types in commands, the shell interprets them and performs the tasks it was asked to do, and finally it sends the result to the standard output (which is usually the screen). For example, the output of the ls command can be something like: