Bash – How to delete input in the terminal

When you press Enter at the end of:

for VARIABLE in file1 file2 file3

The shell can't execute anything since that for loop is not finished. So instead, it will print a different prompt, the $PS2 prompt (generally >), until you enter the closing done.

However, after > is displayed, you can't go back to edit the first line.

Alternatively, instead of typing Enter, you can type Ctrl-VCtrl-J. That way, the newline character (aka ^J) is entered without the current buffer being accepted, and you can then go back to editing the first line later on.

In zsh, you can press Alt-Enter or EscEnter to insert a newline character without accepting the current buffer. To get the same behavior in bash, you can add to your ~/.inputrc:

"\e\C-m": "\026\n"

(\026 being the ^V character).

I don't know who's "responsible" for that Alt+d behavior: I don't know if it's the terminal or if it's the shell (Bash in my case).

It's bash, specifically the default command-line editing setup. Here is a nice page on what commands can be bound, and how to change the default bindings.

The default binding for Alt-d is kill-word which is supposed to work like the command of the same name in Emacs. As you've observed, though, it doesn't—Emacs would consider the space between >> and the tilde in your example to be a word break. That bash does not, I would consider a bug. Short of getting the source for bash, changing it, and recompiling it, I don't know what you can do.