ctrl-a: Move the cursor to the start of the line. Much better than holding the left arrow for 30 seconds, especially over a serial connection. If you use screen, you can type “ctrl-a a” to achieve the same effect or change the screen command key combination to something else. (I use ctrl-s for screen rather than ctrl-a)

ctrl-e: Same as ctrl-a but it moves the cursor to the end of the line.

ctrl-w: Delete the whole word to the left of the cursor on the command line.

ctrl-s: Pause terminal output. The program keeps running in the background but the terminal just displays wherever it was up to. Handy for the middle of large “find” or “grep” operations.

ctrl-q: Releases the terminal again after using ctrl-s. This one is really handy to know if you accidentally hit ctrl-s and can’t figure out how to get your terminal working again.

To go with ctrl-z and fg are a couple of other commands: “bg” is the same as “fg” except that the program runs in the background instead of the foreground. The output still appears on the terminal and the program is still tied to the bash process (i.e it’s still a child of the bash process) which means it will be killed if you log out but you can type in the terminal and start new programs.

The “jobs” command will list all of the process you have that are suspended or running in the background. This list will have a number next to each process. You can fg or bg any process from a list by using the number after the fg or bg command. e.g. “fg 3″ will bring the process numbered 3 to the foreground.

The “disown” command will disconnect a process from the bash session it was started in. This means the process will keep running even if you log out. Disown accepts the same numbers that fg and bg do from the jobs command.

Lastly, if you add an ampersand ( & ) after a command it will automatically start in the background.