Shell Cheatsheet

Scroll through (vim) output by page

Instead of holding down up and down to scroll through a long page:

• space to move down by page
• b to move back up by page

Quickly move from end to start of a command prompt

Instead of holding down the left and right arrow keys to move through a command prompt

• CTRL + a to go to the start of the prompt
• CTRL + e to go to the end of a prompt

Search through a directory of files for a regex string content

grep -Hn -r -E 'user.+account' ./dir_path

Copy all the file contents of a directory

find /home/vagrant/dotfiles -type f -print0 | xargs -0 cp -t $HOME

• Use find with flags -type f -print0 to list out all the files in the target directory with a null char delimiter instead of a new line
• this allows for the selection of file names with whitespaces and such
• pipe the results into xgargs with flag -0 telling it that the arguments are separated by null chars
• xargs is like .map on the Unix command line, it turns what has been piped into it into a list of arguments to then call the following command on each one

References and Further Reading

• Explain shell