Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 4 - DEVELOPER TOOLS GUIDE, Manual

Page: 303 / 410

Chapter 29. Command Line Editing 293
29.2.3. Readline Killing Commands
Killing text means to delete the text from the line, but to save it away for later use, usually by yanking
(re-inserting) it back into the line. (‘Cut’ and ‘paste’ are more recent jargon for ‘kill’ and ‘yank’.)
If the description for a command says that it ‘kills’ text, then you can be sure that you can get the text
back in a different (or the same) place later.
When you use a kill command, the text is saved in a
kill-ring . Any number of consecutive kills save
all of the killed text together, so that when you yank it back, you get it all. The kill ring is not line
specific; the text that you killed on a previously typed line is available to be yanked back later, when
you are typing another line. Here is the list of commands for killing text.
C-k
Kill the text from the current cursor position to the end of the line.
M-d
Kill from the cursor to the end of the current word, or, if between words, to the end of the next
word. Word boundaries are the same as those used by
M-f
.
M-[DEL]
Kill from the cursor the start of the current word, or, if between words, to the start of the previous
word. Word boundaries are the same as those used by
M-b
.
C-w
Kill from the cursor to the previous whitespace. This is different than
M-[DEL]
because the
word boundaries differ.
Here is how to yank the text back into the line. Yanking means to copy the most-recently-killed text
from the kill buffer.
C-y
Yank the most recently killed text back into the buffer at the cursor.
M-y
Rotate the kill-ring, and yank the new top. You can only do this if the prior command is
C-y
or
M-y
.
29.2.4. Readline Arguments
You can pass numeric arguments to Readline commands. Sometimes the argument acts as a repeat
count, other times it is the sign of the argument that is significant. If you pass a negative argument to a
command which normally acts in a forward direction, that command will act in a backward direction.
For example, to kill text back to the start of the line, you might type
M- C-k
.
The general way to pass numeric arguments to a command is to type meta digits before the command.
If the first ‘digit’ typed is a minus sign (
-
), then the sign of the argument will be negative. Once you
have typed one meta digit to get the argument started, you can type the remainder of the digits, and
then the command. For example, to give the C-d command an argument of 10, you could type
M-1 0
C-d
, which will delete the next ten characters on the input line.