Highlighting my terminal commands?

corblimey

In Ubuntu 804 Is it possible to do something whereby my terminal commands are highlighted in the sea of information that usually follows? Having them in bold or ideally a different background color would help me a lot when I have to backtrack several pages to find the top of the command. It seems like something someone somewhere already thought of and implemented?

turgon

Em well I now that if you typing a new command you just press the up button and it enters your previous commands in the prompt.

So to redo the last command just enter up once and then enter.

Thats in GNOME at least (Ubuntu 9.04), but I dont know if that will satisfy what you want.

corblimey

It's less to do with finding the last command and more to do with finding where the results of the last command start! If I type in something that returns a page or 2 of feedback lines (like a grep or something) then I want to scroll back up the window and find the first line of that feedback section:

grep -H -r "string" folder/
folder/file1: line
folder/file2: line
folder/file3: line
folder/file4: line
folder/file5: line
etc

. So if I'm interested in the first result, I've got to scroll back up the terminal window, but if this is the fifth or fifteenth time I've tried this search (as it normally is), I can't immediately where the previous search ended and this one started.

Does that make sense?

An Fear Aniar

You could pipe it to "more"

command | more

Might be easier to scroll through the results.

.

Orion

Occams razor. When I'm doing something like that on VMS or Linux I just hit enter 7 or 8 times to leave blank space. Then you can just scroll up and you find those blank lines easily.

StiLL-TrAiNinG

Macros42 wrote: »

Occams razor. When I'm doing something like that on VMS or Linux I just hit enter 7 or 8 times to leave blank space. Then you can just scroll up and you find those blank lines easily.

I usually do something similar to this, using clear a few times.

Another solution might be to add some colour to your prompt, something like:
http://www.wiredrevolution.com/bash-programming/customize-the-bash-ps1-command-prompt might be useful in making it more distinct.

corblimey

Macros42 wrote: »

Occams razor. When I'm doing something like that on VMS or Linux I just hit enter 7 or 8 times to leave blank space. Then you can just scroll up and you find those blank lines easily.

Yeah, that's what I've been doing aswell except I don't remember to do it until the fourth time I've run the same command

Oh well, I was kinda hoping there was a simple way to do it

ETA: That link looks interesting Still-Training, I'll take a closer look later.

Khannie

An Fear Aniar wrote: »

You could pipe it to "more"

command | more

Might be easier to scroll through the results.

.

More is for babies. "less" is where it's at.

Try ctrl+l (this clears the current shell screen), then use:

command | less

Less allows you to move forward and backwards using vi style shortcuts (shift + G moves to the end etc) and also supports pattern matching in the vi style (hit / then type in the pattern you want to match, then n for the next instance, etc.).

An Fear Aniar

Khannie wrote: »

More is for babies. "less" is where it's at.

Lol! You're more or less right I think.:)

.

E39MSport

I use this in my profile. Might help.

# General settings...
HISTSIZE=500

# Define screen attributes and prompt...
TERM=vt100
set +a
tput init
bold=`tput -T$TERM bold`
rev=`tput -T$TERM rev`
underline=`tput -T$TERM smul`
standout=`tput -T$TERM smso`
off=`tput -T$TERM sgr0`
set -a
PS1='${bold}!${off} ${underline}$PWD${off}: '

corblimey

E39MSport wrote: »

I use this in my profile. Might help.

Sorry, but of a noob here, where exactly do you put this information?

Orion

in .bashrc in your home directory. It's a standard text file.

E39MSport

corblimey wrote: »

Sorry, but of a noob here, where exactly do you put this information?

Mine's in my .profile in my home directory.