Cisco CLI Tips and Tricks
Ctrl+P or UP | Moves backwards through command history |
Ctrl+N or DOWN | Moves forward through command history |
Key Combination | Result |
|---|---|
Ctrl+B or LEFT | Moves 1 character to the left (Backward) |
Ctrl+F or RIGHT | Moves 1 character to the right (Forward) |
ESC,B | Moves 1 word to the left (Backward) |
ESC,F | Moves 1 word to the right (Forward) |
Ctrl+A | Moves to the beginning of the line |
Ctrl+E | Moves to the end of the line |
Key Combination | Result |
|---|---|
DEL or BACKSPACE | Deletes one character to the left of the cursor |
Ctrl+D | Deletes the character at the cursor |
Ctrl+K | Deletes all the characters from the cursor to the end of the command line |
Ctrl+U or Ctrl+X | Deletes all the characters from the beginning of the line to the cursor |
Ctrl+W | Deletes the word to the left of the cursor |
ESC,D | Deletes from the cursor to the end of the word |
Key Combination | Result |
|---|---|
Ctrl+Y | Recalls the most recent characters deleted with Ctrl+X, Ctrl+K or Ctrl+U |
ESC,Y | After recalling with Ctrl+Y, browse through the history of deleted characters |
Text | Capitalizes the letter at the cursor |
|---|---|
Ctrl+L or Ctrl+R | Transposes the character to the left of the cursor with the character to the right |
Ctrl+T | Transposes the character to the left of the cursor with the character to the right |
ESC,C | Capitalizes the letter at the cursor |
ESC,L | Changes the word at the cursor to lowercase |
ESC,U | Changes the word at the cursor to uppercase |
Ctrl+V or ESC,Q | Make the system accept the following key as a command, not asa an editing command – Useful for inserting “?” into the command |
When running a show command you can limit the output by only showing the lines that begin with, include or do not include a certain Regular Expression:
R# show COMMAND | {being|include|exclude} REGEX
When the output is long enough to generate a -More- line, you can filter the output using :
-More-
/REGEX
! Goes to the first match of Regular Expression
-REGEX
! Displays lines that do not contain the Regular Expression
+REGEX
! Displays lines that contain the Regular Expression
Regular expressions define patterns of characters that are used to match lines in a text entry. Usually a character in the REGEX matches itself in a string, but there are some special characters or groups of characters that don’t match themselves:
Character | Meaning |
|---|---|
. | Matches a single character, including space |
_ | Matches: , { } ( _ space beginning-of-string end-of-string |
\ | Escape character used to match a special character |
Groups | |
[LIST] | Matches any character in the LIST. The LIST can be specified as an unordered group of characters and ranges, like a-dA-D |
[^LIST] | Matches any character that is not part of the LIST. |
A pattern can be a character or a group of characters between parenthesis (). Between parenthesis, a | acts as a logical OR. Patterns can be multiplied if followed by one of the Multiplier characters. Also, you can recall a pattern used once, if you use a \ followed by the number which indicates which pattern it is.
(PATTERN) | Matches the PATTERN |
|---|---|
(PATTERN1|PATTERN2) | Matches PATTERN1 or PATTERN2 |
Multipliers | |
* | Matches 0 or more sequences of the pattern |
+ | Matches 1 or more sequences of the pattern |
? | Matches 0 or 1 sequences of the pattern |
^ | Matches the beginning of string |
$ | Matches end of the string |
\n | Recalls the n-th pattern and uses it again in the regular expression |