What's your most-used terminal trick nobody taught you?

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Great tips :slight_smile:

I often use ctrl + l (lowercase L) to clear the screen. It’s the same as running the clear command, with the difference that ctrl + l still lets you “scroll back” (so it doesn’t delete the scrollback buffer), so you can see the commands and outputs that happened before pressing ctrl + l

There are other ones but I’m guessing the cd - command is rather useful to switch “back and forth” between two directories. Here’s an example:

ricmarques@mypc:~$ cd /boot/grub/
ricmarques@mypc:/boot/grub$ 
ricmarques@mypc:/boot/grub$ ls -l
total 2404
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    4096 dez  5  2022 fonts
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     712 fev  8  2025 gfxblacklist.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root    8731 abr 17 23:56 grub.cfg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root    1024 abr 18  2026 grubenv
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    4096 mai  4  2025 locale
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2411806 mai 24  2025 unicode.pf2
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   20480 mai  4  2025 x86_64-efi
ricmarques@mypc:/boot/grub$ 

ricmarques@mypc:/boot/grub$ cd /etc/default/grub.d/
ricmarques@mypc:/etc/default/grub.d$ ls -l
total 0
ricmarques@mypc:/etc/default/grub.d$ cd -
/boot/grub
ricmarques@mypc:/boot/grub$ cd -
/etc/default/grub.d
ricmarques@mypc:/etc/default/grub.d$
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