Typing a bash command, I'm at its third line. But how do I return to its beginning to edit something I've missed?

Question

I'm typing that command and my cursor is at the end of "supprimer des warnings"

$ git commit -m "Nettoyage :
>     - Suppression de sources ou projets inutiles
>     - Corrections mineures sur les sources pour supprimer des warnings"

It's the time I notice that I should have written "Nettoyage (deuxième partie)" at the beginning of my commit message.

...but how, being at the last line of my command, may I go up to the beginning of it, to edit it, on its first line?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, command entry in Bash is line-oriented, and you can’t go back to a previous line while entering a multi-line command.

What you can do however is start an editor with the full command entered so far. To do so, in Emacs mode (the default), press CtrlxCtrle; in vi mode, press Escv. This will open your editor with everything you’ve entered so far; fix what needs fixing, complete the command, exit the editor and Bash will run the edited command.

In this particular case you could use an editor for the entire git commit message: omit the -m option and git will start an editor for you.

Answer 2

Press CtrlC, then Up, then re-edit your command, then press Enter.

# git commit -m "Nettoyage :
>      - Suppression de sources ou projets inutiles
>      - Corrections mineures sur les sources pour supprimer des warnings
>      - Autre chose^C

By pressing CtrlC at the end of the line, I lose that line, but with one single Up keystroke, I get back:

# git commit -m "Nettoyage :
     - Suppression de sources ou projets inutiles
     - Corrections mineures sur les sources pour supprimer des warnings

with my cursor placed after the 'ings'. I can then navigate back and forth through all three lines of text using Left and Right, to the beginning of the command with Home or CtrlA, to the end of the command with End or CtrlE, etc.

I'm not using any exotic readline settings, to my knowledge. Seems to be standard behavior of Bash 5.1.16 on FreeBSD 13.0.

Answer 3

You don't. Or not as far as I know, I hope someone else will post an answer and prove me wrong! The best thing I've found so far is to hit Enter to move to a new line (without this, on my system, you don't get back the full command in the later steps but only the part before the last newline entered) and then Ctrl + D to abort the command:

$ git commit -m "Nettoyage :
>      - Suppression de sources ou projets inutiles
>      - Corrections mineures sur les sources pour supprimer des warnings

Now press Enter:

$ git commit -m "Nettoyage :
>      - Suppression de sources ou projets inutiles
>      - Corrections mineures sur les sources pour supprimer des warnings
>

And now Ctrl + D :

$ git commit -m "Nettoyage :
>      - Suppression de sources ou projets inutiles
>      - Corrections mineures sur les sources pour supprimer des warnings
> bash: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `"'

You can now press ⇧ (up) to get back to the previous command and now you will be able to edit it as expected:

$ git commit -m "Nettoyage :
     - Suppression de sources ou projets inutiles
     - Corrections mineures sur les sources pour supprimer des warnings

Not perfect, but it might work as a workaround.

Answer 4

For your question: How to write multi-line shell commands that let you go back to the first line

Instead of hitting Enter at the end of the first line, use Ctrl+V Ctrl+J. That'll insert a newline without entering the command to bash. No new prompt (like >) will be printed, because to bash, it's still the same entry. If you had done that, you would have been able to go back to the first line with Ctrl+A when using the default emacs keybindings or ^ when using the vi keybindings.

Here's an example with bash using the default emacs bindings:

If you use zsh instead of bash, then you can use the Up/Down keys, or Ctrl+P/Ctrl+N with default emacs keybindings, or j/k with vi keybindings to move between the lines of the single prompt entry.

If you use zsh with vi keybindings, you can also use o/O in normal mode to create new lines below or above the current one in the same prompt entry. Those are the keybindings that I normally use in zsh:

For your situation: How to fix the start of your git message from the end of the command

Just add -e at the end of the command, and git will take you to the editor with the contents of the -m argument(s).

Here's an example of what you could've done in your particular situation:

Answer 5

As an alternative to typing a multi-line string literally, you can use Bash's backslash-escape-expanded string, like

git commit -m $'Nettoyage :\n     - Suppression de sources ou projets inutiles\n     - Corrections mineures sur les sources pour supprimer des warnings'

This lets you flatten the multiline string into a single line and use \n to denote line feeds. The resulting command will have real line feeds in the string.