Is there a way for me to run another command and return to the current? An example would be using vi to input a string of characters. I realize I need to check something so I back out of the input and run a shell command using ":!<shell command>". I get the output from that command and hit any key to get back to what I was previously doing in vi. Is there any known way of doing this from the command line? I use the standard emacs as my command line interpretor but if vi has this function at the command line, I'll switch.

I know everyone is going to say why? Just open another shell. But what if I am at a console? Yeah I know use screen. But what if I don't have screen installed at the time? Just picking brains.

Do you just mean hit "Ctrl-z" to suspend a program whilst you do whatever you want in the shell and then "fg" to return to whatever you were doing?

If so, you might want to read this http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/man...ol-Basics.html

If that isn't what you want, then you may have to explain your problem again more clearly.

In vi you can use Esc (to ensure you are in command mode) then :!<command> to run a command. If <command> is the command for a shell then that shell will run until you exit it when the vi session will resume.

Okay so there is a bit of misunderstanding. Here is an example of what I am trying to do. I am at a bash command line. I want to run tcpdump on a dual homed system. I start typing "tcpdump -i eth" I just realize I don't remember which nic is the nic I want to dump info for. Is there a way for me to run "ifconfig -a" without loosing what I currently have on the command line? This would help if I had a huge amount of arguments or if I was running a loop at the command line and didn't want to back out of what I currently have.

I know that I can cut and paste, put an "#" at the beginning of the line if I were to just hit "Ctrl-c" .. etc. I just don't like pulling my hand away from the home row. So from my example above, it would be like using the ":! <shell command>" in vi.

You have set quite a challenge to do this w/o moving your hands away from the home row, but we'll see what we can do! ;-) I think you have several options!

You have alluded to inserting a comment, and a quick way to do that is "Ctrl-A # Ret". How easy that is depends on where # is on your keyboard. A quicker way is to use readline to bind a key to "insert-comment" (see here) By default this is Alt-# which is quite easy on my keyboard. If you don't like it you can change it too.

Yet another method would be to run gnu screen all the time. http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/ Then you could "alt-a c" to make a new terminal run what you want and alt-a alt-a back (and then alt-a alt-a between the two as much as you like...) I do this when I ssh into a box.

Finally if you are running on a vt of course you have the options of alt-1 alt-2 etc to get to different terminals.

If none of those are satisfactory then you are very hard to satisfy! :-D

Edit: ok you have already said you might not have screen installed... so you don't like that one, so here is another option to replace it...

Readline also has a "backwards-kill-line" which by default is bound to "c-x rubout" (for me that is ctrl-x backspace). Then do what you want and on the next line yank with ctrl-y to yank back what you deleted before. Again if you don't like the bindings you can change them.

Thanks Vrajgh for your insite. I am pretty command line savy. But you know how it is. The more you know the lazier you get when it comes to inputting text at the command line. Also I know that if you can think of it, it might be possible with linux/unix. So I just had to ask.