Ubuntu – How to type on the next line in the Terminal

command line

I am using Ubuntu 12.10 and want to run a set of commands in the terminal, and from what i see in the instructions, these commands each start on a new line. I don't know how to do this in the terminal. I can't find what key to press to do the carriage-return to the next line.

Best Answer

As Web-E explains the most direct way to do what you want with two different commands, I thought I'd show that there are a number of ways to execute multiple commands or to continue commands onto another line without immediately executing them.

Continuing long commands:

1) The most common way to construct one long command is to enter your commands, then use a backslash \, press return, and then Bash will provide another prompt for you instead of executing the command. This secondary prompt is called PS2 and waits for your input:

find /home/mike/Downloads -type f -iname '*.jpg' \
>

You can keep on adding backslashes and pressing return as long as you want, as long as you think the overall command will make sense.

You can cancel this secondary prompt with the usual Ctrl+C.

2) Bash recognises some commands such as for loops (for i in....) and the prompt will appear immediately; just as it will if you miss a quotation mark off a command:

apt-cache search 'libgimp*
>

Multiple Commands:

3) As Lxnslck notes, you can separate commands with semicolons:

which vlc; whereis vlc

/usr/bin/vlc
vlc: /usr/bin/vlc /etc/vlc /usr/lib/vlc /usr/bin/X11/vlc /usr/share/vlc /usr/share/man/man1/vlc.1.gz

4) Or you can use the ampersand && to join two commands:

./configure && make

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to get long command lines to wrap to the next line

Make sure all non-printable bytes in your PS1 are contained within \[ \]. Otherwise, bash will count them in the length of the prompt. It uses the length of the prompt to determine when to wrap the line.

For example, here bash counts the prompt as 19 columns wide, while the prompt displayed by the terminal is only 10 columns wide (My prompt written in cyan, and > written in default color):

PS1='\e[36mMy prompt\e[0m>'         # bash count: 19, actual: 10

while here it only counts the prompt as 10 columns wide because it ignores the bytes between the special \[ and \] escapes:

PS1='\[\e[36m\]My prompt\[\e[0m\]>' # bash count: 10, actual: 10

For good practice though, use tput to generate the terminal escapes rather than hard coding them:

cyan=$(tput setaf 6) # \e[36m
reset=$(tput sgr0)   # \e[0m
PS1='\[$cyan\]My prompt\[$reset\]>'

See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/053, and also http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/scripting/terminalcodes for more on tput.

Ubuntu – Stop Terminal from saving commands

Several things you could do.

1. Type a space in front of each command you run.

It's tedious, but putting a space in front of your commands will keep them from being saved to the bash history.

2. Set a Cronjob to delete .bash_history every hour

Your terminals historical commands are stored in .bash_history in your home directory. If you delete the file, it will effectively remove your history.

First create the script to remove the .bash_history file:

nano ~/script.sh

and add:

#!/bin/bash
rm /home/user/.bash_history

then run:

chmod 775 script.sh

to make script executable and run:

crontab -e

and add 1 * * * * * /home/user/script.sh.

Then exit and save, and it should delete your history every hour.

3. Run `unset HISTFILE`, as @Carl suggested.

Just run it before exiting the terminal, and it will not save those commands that you ran in the last session to .bash_history.