Cisco IOS Command Line Interface Keyboard Shortcuts

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Learning to configure your Cisco devices from the Command Line Interface (CLI) is an essential step towards your Cisco networking career. This means that you need to learn how to configure the Cisco IOS operating system which runs on routers, switches and other network devices. Acquiring this hands-on experience with the Cisco IOS CLI will help you enormously in your network administration tasks or even for certification exams.

In this post I’m providing some useful keyboard shortcuts that you can use when configuring a Cisco device via command line. These shortcuts are sometimes asked in CCNA certification exam questions.

Keyboard Shortcut	Action
Up Arrow	Particularly useful. It displays your previous commands. Pressing the up arrow repeatedly will show all previous commands typed (command history)
TAB Key	Particularly useful. It completes a partially typed CLI command. E.g if you type “show run” and press TAB, it will complete the command as “show running-config“
CTRL+Z	Takes you back to Privileged EXEC Mode. E.g if you are in Global Config Mode Router(config)# and press CTRL+Z it will take you back to Router# mode
CTRL+A	Places the cursor at the beginning of a line
CTRL+E	Places the cursor at the end of a line
CTRL+R	Redisplays the current command line
CTRL+W	Erases a word (behind the cursor)
CTRL+U	Erases an entire line