Bash – How to simulate keyboard shortcuts in a bash alias

aliasbashkeyboard shortcutslinux

For example, one of my bash aliases is this

alias p='clear;ls -lt;pwd;'

clear also clears the history which I don't want. I just want to clear the screen momentarily.

Ctrl+L however does exactly what I want. How can I use it in my alias?

Best Answer

If clear is clearing history and the terminal there must be a function, alias or script that is doing that. See what type -a clear tells you.

Another way to clear the terminal is to use tput clear which does exactly the same thing as what clear is supposed to do. You can also try doing it directly using the escape sequence (for xterm for example), but it may be different for different terminals (it should work for any that emulate xterm, such as gnome-terminal, PuTTY, etc.): printf '\e[H\e[2J'

Related Solutions

Bash – Does one alias affect another alias

From Aliases (section 6.6 of the Bash Manual):

The first word of each simple command, if unquoted, is checked to see if it has an alias. If so, that word is replaced by the text of the alias.

This happens when you use the alias, not when you define it. Here's an example:

$ alias a1='a2 hello'
$ alias a2='echo'
$ a1
hello
$ unalias a2
$ a1
bash: a2: command not found

Bash Keyboard Shortcuts – How to Remap Ctrl-l

The bind command defines new key bindings. With the -x parameter, you can assign a shell snippet to a key. The quoting is a bit strange: the key must be quoted for the readline key parser, and the binding description must be quoted because it contains several shell special characters.

bind -x '"\C-l": clear; ls'

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Does one alias affect another alias

Bash Keyboard Shortcuts – How to Remap Ctrl-l

Related Question