Linux/Unix: Quickly deleting the last word on the command line

There are very handy shortcuts (that many people are not aware of), that you can use to quickly delete the last word/argument on the command line.

CTRL+w is the most known variant. For example, typing:

vim mydir/myfile^W

Will result in:

vim

This functionality is a part of GNU Readline and it works out of the box in Bash (and everything else that uses GNU Readline).

Readline function which does this is called unix-word-rubout. You can check that by doing something like bind -p | grep "\C-w":

"\C-w": unix-word-rubout

Alt+Backspace

But what if you don't want to use the white space as the separator, but any non-alphanumeric character?

There is a Readline command called backward-kill-word (bound to Alt+Backspace by default) which does exactly that:

vim mydir/myfile^[^?

Result:

vim mydir/

If you try to do bind -p | grep backward-kill-word, you should see something like this:

"\e\C-?": backward-kill-word

Remapping CTRL+w

CTRL+w is a bit more reachable than Alt+Backspace, so if you prefer to use it for the backward-kill-word functionality, you can do something like this:

bind '\C-w:backward-kill-word'

If you want to make the change permanent, add this to your ~/.bashrc.

ZSH

ZSH doesn't use Readline, but it provides CTRL+w functionality out of the box, although the provided functionality is closer to backward-kill-word (Alt+Backspace) in GNU Readline.

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