30 Linux Terminal Tricks That Save Me Hours Every Week

Most time lost in the terminal isn't in the commands — it's in retyping, scrolling and fixing typos. These are the tricks I use every day. All of them work in Bash, and almost all in Zsh.

Moving around the line

That last one is a lifesaver for long one-liners: edit comfortably in Vim or nano, save, and it runs.

History superpowers

1. Ctrl+R — search your history as you type. Press it again to cycle through older matches.
2. !! — the previous command. Forgot sudo? sudo !!
3. !$ — the last argument of the previous command: mkdir project && cd !$
4. Alt+. — inserts the last argument, and pressing again cycles back through earlier ones
5. ^old^new — rerun the last command with a replacement: ^stagging^staging
6. history | grep docker then !123 to rerun entry 123

Make history bigger and shared between terminals — add to ~/.bashrc:

HISTSIZE=100000
HISTFILESIZE=200000
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth:erasedups
shopt -s histappend
PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a; $PROMPT_COMMAND"

Expansion tricks

1. Brace expansion creates lists without typing them:

mkdir -p app/{components,lib,styles}
cp config.yml{,.bak}          # → cp config.yml config.yml.bak
touch day{01..31}.md

1. cd - jumps back to the previous directory.
2. `/`* matches recursively (shopt -s globstar in Bash): ls **/*.test.ts
3. $(...) drops a command's output into another: kill $(pgrep -f "node server")

Pipes that do real work

1. Count things: sort | uniq -c | sort -rn — the classic "top N":

# most common status codes in an nginx log
awk '{print $9}' access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head

1. xargs turns lines into arguments; -P runs them in parallel:

fd -e png | xargs -P 8 -I{} cwebp -q 80 {} -o {}.webp

1. tee writes to a file and still passes output on — and | sudo tee file is how you write to root-owned files.
2. Process substitution compares command outputs directly:

diff <(ls dir-a) <(ls dir-b)

1. column -t turns messy whitespace output into a readable table.
2. watch -n 2 'command' reruns anything every two seconds.

Jobs and processes

1. Ctrl+Z pauses a running program; bg resumes it in the background, fg brings it back.
2. command &> log.txt & runs in the background with all output in a file.
3. nohup or disown keeps it running after you close the terminal.
4. ss -tulpn shows what's listening on which port (the modern netstat).
5. lsof -i :3000 — who is using port 3000?

Files

1. *`du -sh | sort -h`** — what's eating the disk in this folder.
2. df -h — free space on every mount.
3. tail -f file follows a growing log; less +F does too, and lets you scroll.
4. rsync -avh --progress src/ dest/ — copying that can resume and shows progress.
5. *`find . -name ".log" -mtime +7 -delete`** — clean up old logs.

Small habits, big payoff

1. Aliases for things you type ten times a day:

alias gs='git status -sb'
alias ll='ls -lah'
alias ..='cd ..'
alias please='sudo $(fc -ln -1)'

1. A mkcd function: mkcd() { mkdir -p "$1" && cd "$1"; }
2. set -euo pipefail at the top of every Bash script, so errors stop the script instead of silently continuing.
3. tldr command — community-written examples instead of a 40-page man page.

Want to go further? Swap a few classic tools for their faster modern versions — I cover my favourites in modern CLI tools worth installing.