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I've become pretty proficient with a number of bash shortcut keys that make my bash-ing faster: C-a/C-e, C-u, C-w, M-f/M-b, C-r etc. One common task that I haven't found a good shortcut for though is when I want to delete the last segment of a path:

Say I have 

ls ~/projects/arcaneweb/libraries

and I realize I actually meant

ls ~/projects/arcaneweb/sources

Is there a way to just delete libraries, saving a load of keystrokes?

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You're asking about bash, so I'm posting this as a comment instead of an answer: In zsh you can accomplish what you want by setting the WORDCHARS env variable: WORDCHARS=${WORDCHARS//[-\/]} (removes - and / from being part of a "word"). I find this very useful so thought I'd share. – James O'Gorman Dec 28 '11 at 19:23
I usually just hit M-Backspace repeatedly until desired effect is reached. – jw013 Dec 29 '11 at 2:52
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migrated from serverfault.com Dec 28 '11 at 21:15

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3 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

A single shortcut: M-backspace

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Wow, that's so obvious! I guess I always assumed this would be the same as C-w for some reason. – notJim Jan 5 at 17:12
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In zsh, you may need to add bindkey "^[^?" vi-backward-kill-word to your .zshrc. – Juliano Jan 5 at 20:03
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up vote 5 down vote

M-b,C-k is the quickest I've found, made a bit less so due to needing to use ESC as Meta. If you have Alt/Option bound as Meta, this would be reasonably fast once you develop the muscle memory for it.

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Binding option to meta is the first thing I do when setting up my terminal :). M-b, C-k is pretty good, I think I can get used to that. – notJim Dec 28 '11 at 19:17
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there's also M-b,M-d but all those are for the emacs keybindings, there's also vi-mode – Samus_ Dec 29 '11 at 0:01
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up vote 4 down vote

There is a replace option but not sure it would really save keystrokes unless the path was long.

^abc^xyz

This will replace the first occurrence of abc with xyz.

[root~]# ls -l /var/log/messages
-rw-------  1 root root 850312 Dec 28 14:08 /var/log/messages
[root ~]# ^messages^secure
ls -l /var/log/secure
-rw-------  1 root root 652614 Dec 28 14:08 /var/log/secure

Bash Shortcut reference: http://www.skorks.com/2009/09/bash-shortcuts-for-maximum-productivity/

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Oh, that's awesome. Not great for this particular use case, but definitely will be useful elsewhere. – notJim Dec 28 '11 at 19:19
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