List of Terminal shortcuts

gistfile1.txt

Ctrl + A  Go to the beginning of the line you are currently typing on
Ctrl + E	Go to the end of the line you are currently typing on
Ctrl + L	Clears the Screen, similar to the clear command
Ctrl + U	Clears the line before the cursor position. If you are at the end of the line, clears the entire line.
Ctrl + H	Same as backspace
Ctrl + R	Let’s you search through previously used commands
Ctrl + C	Kill whatever you are running
Ctrl + D	Exit the current shell
Ctrl + Z	Puts whatever you are running into a suspended background process. fg restores it.
Ctrl + W	Delete the word before the cursor
Ctrl + K	Clear the line after the cursor
Ctrl + T	Swap the last two characters before the cursor
Esc + T	Swap the last two words before the cursor

A note about ctrl-U,K,W:

This doesn't just delete the string, it puts it into a buffer in this shell's session. It can be recalled by typing a ctrl-Y.

this is really handy for when you're typing out a complex command, realize right before running it or halfway through that you want to do something else, you can ctrl-U, do some other stuff, then hit ctrl-Y to spit it back and do it. Saves the time of selecting the text with the mouse and copying it.

I use that all the time.

For ctrl-Z, fg restores the last backgrounded process of that session, which is usually the process you ctrl-z'd. You can use the jobs command to see what backgrounded processes there are, which will not only list ctrl-z'd processes, but also processes launched in the background, for example via some_longrunning_script.rb &. You can then pass fg a parameter to choose which process to reattach to. You can also kill the processes using their index (the [1], for example) if you prefix it with a %. Like: kill %1.

see man jobs for more info on that.

Oh, also, ctrl-D... that works by sending the EOF character which signifies end of input. This is useful not only for when you're in a shell, but for anything that's waiting on input, be it an interactive database session (mysql or psql), or a cat command. It's friendlier than a ctrl-C since that sends an interrupt signal.

An example of the cat thing above:

cat > some_file

you can then type some stuff in, press enter, type more, press enter... type some more, press enter... seems like it's doing nothing... type a ctrl-D and you're brought back to your prompt. Now look at the contents of some_file and it'll contain everything you just typed. If you ctrl-C, it'll do the same, but only because that's how the cat command is written (it outputs data each time it gets a line), but if it were to buffer everything and only write once input is completed, ctrl-C would completely terminate the action and nothing would occur. When you pipe the output of a command into another, when the first command finishes, it sends the EOF to signal the next process that it's done. ctrl-D is a way for you, the operator, to do this manually.