Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 4 - DEVELOPER TOOLS GUIDE, Manual

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292 Chapter 29. Command Line Editing
C-b
Move back one character.
C-f
Move forward one character.
[DEL] or [Backspace]
Delete the character to the left of the cursor.
C-d
Delete the character underneath the cursor.
Printing characters
Insert the character into the line at the cursor.
C-_
or
C-x C-u
Undo the last editing command. You can undo all the way back to an empty line.
(Depending on your configuration, the [Backspace] key be set to delete the character to the left of the
cursor and the [DEL] key set to delete the character underneath the cursor, like
C-d
, rather than the
character to the left of the cursor.)
29.2.2. Readline Movement Commands
The above table describes the most basic keystrokes that you need in order to do editing of the input
line. For your convenience, many other commands have been added in addition to
C-b
,
C-f
,
C-d
,
and [DEL]. Here are some commands for moving more rapidly about the line.
C-a
Move to the start of the line.
C-e
Move to the end of the line.
M-f
Move forward a word, where a word is composed of letters and digits.
M-b
Move backward a word.
C-l
Clear the screen, reprinting the current line at the top.
Notice how
C-f
moves forward a character, while
M-f
moves forward a word. It is a loose convention
that control keystrokes operate on characters while meta keystrokes operate on words.