I use Oracle Linux just about every day. I teach Oracle classes using Oracle Linux and work with a whole bunch of Oracle servers which, more often than not, use Oracle Linux (or sometimes Redhat Linux which is basically very similar to Oracle Linux). The vast majority of the time these systems are set up to use bash (From wikipedia: The name itself is an acronym, a pun, and a description. As an acronym, it stands for Bourne-again shell, referring to its objective as a free replacement for the Bourne shell. As a pun, it expressed that objective in a phrase that sounds similar to born again, a term for spiritual rebirth. The name is also descriptive of what it did, bashing together the features of sh, csh, and ksh.) as the default shell for users.

While teaching my classes, I frequently type commands while my students watch and it’s not unusual for me to make typing mistakes. I often bang the BACKSPACE key a bunch of times while removing a single word, or worse yet, I hold it down to erase and entire line and start all over again. Every time I did this I would think “I used to know how to do this better.”

Today I looked it up a book that I have sitting on my bookshelf, (I last read it in 1995), which I would highly recommend if you’re a Unix System Admin: Using csh & tcsh Type Less, Accomplish More. It’s a really great book if you are going to be using a Unix shell all day every day interactively. I read it way back when I was learning Unix and it made a huge difference in my productivity with interactive ‘shelling’. These days I’m mostly only working with Linux to get Oracle systems set up and configured correctly, so I’m usually sticking with the default shell… which is bash.

I tested out some of the things in the book and they work a bit differently in tcsh than they do in bash. Since I’ve become (largely by default) a bash user, here goes:

Remove the entire command line in bash with CTRL-u or CTLR-w

[oracle@multitenant ~]$ This is a command line that I want to erase

Type CTRL-u or CTRL-w (as an aside, CTRL-w in tcsh erases a single word) and voila:

[oracle@multitenant ~]$

Sometime I only mess up the last word…

Remove the last word typed in bash with ESC BACKSPACE

[oracle@multitenant ~]$ env | grep ORALCE

Oops! Messed up that ORACLE. Type ESC BACKSPACE and voila:

[oracle@multitenant ~]$ env | grep

Now I can correctly add ORACLE to the above without having to use backspace six times.

Reuse part of the previous commands arguments with !$, !^, !*

Often we’ll look at the contents of a file and then decide we want to edit it.

[oracle@multitenant ~]# cat /etc/oratab

Hmmm…. I see something I want to change, so rather than typing vi /etc/oratab I can just do the following:

[oracle@multitenant ~]# vi !$

!$ uses the last argument from the previous command, !^ uses the first argument from the previous command, and !* uses all arguments from the last command, so actually any of those would have worked in the example above. Remember that above I have two parts in the line I’m typing; The first is the actual command (cat) and then the second is the argument (/etc/oratab).

Hopefully this (along with the CTRL-r post from earlier) will help a few folks become just a bit more efficient in their day to day operations!