It's the ability to attribute a command to a key press: Command Binding.
The typical case is a frequent command and an unused function key.
Lets say, just for example, prtstat -J and the F5 key.
Initially, F5 is unbound.
As per my keyboard definitions, pressing ^V+F5 under an X terminal I get:
(under a sun-color console terminal the code is different: \e[244z)
# ^[[15~
NOTE
For the BASH READLINE, the sequence ^[ is denoted by \e. The codes that are generated may depend on many filtering layers. This can widely vary depending on particular configurations, resulting on a lot of frustration. For a sun-color terminal one way to better take control of this is presented here: Keyboard - Layouts.
The desired binding must be described on .inputrc:
(assuming that the keyboard was configured as on the above link)
# cat ~/.inputrc
...
$if term=xterm
...
"\e[15~": "prstat -J \n"
...
$endif
...
$if term=sun-color
...
"\e[244z": "prstat -J \n"
...
$endif
...
Now, every time I press F5 that command will be executed:
PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP
1306 user1 11M 3312K cpu0 49 0 0:00:00 0.2% prstat/1
1252 user1 19M 5032K sleep 59 0 0:00:00 0.0% sshd/1
1253 user1 11M 2828K sleep 49 0 0:00:00 0.0% bash/1
417 root 15M 3608K sleep 59 0 0:00:02 0.0% nscd/26
445 root 11M 1996K sleep 59 0 0:00:01 0.0% VBoxService/7
5 root 0K 0K sleep 99 -20 0:00:05 0.0% zpool-rpool/147
1277 user1 11M 2944K sleep 59 0 0:00:00 0.0% bash/1
223 root 14M 4432K sleep 59 0 0:00:01 0.0% devfsadm/8
15 root 20M 19M sleep 59 0 0:00:41 0.0% svc.configd/26
591 root 7132K 1980K sleep 59 0 0:00:00 0.0% sendmail/1
598 root 99M 13M sleep 59 0 0:00:02 0.0% fmd/34
476 root 4272K 2296K sleep 59 0 0:00:00 0.0% hald-addon-acpi/1
96 root 10M 1488K sleep 59 0 0:00:00 0.0% in.mpathd/1
13 root 28M 19M sleep 59 0 0:00:18 0.0% svc.startd/14
469 root 8688K 6588K sleep 59 0 0:00:00 0.0% hald/4
406 root 8848K 932K sleep 59 0 0:00:00 0.0% iscsid/2
107 root 2696K 1424K sleep 59 0 0:00:00 0.0% pfexecd/3
74 daemon 10M 1436K sleep 60 -20 0:00:00 0.0% kcfd/3
92 root 4032K 2320K sleep 59 0 0:00:00 0.0% svc.periodicd/4
67 netadm 4992K 3232K sleep 59 0 0:00:00 0.0% ipmgmtd/6
169 root 2748K 1392K sleep 60 -20 0:00:00 0.0% zonestatd/5
PROJID NPROC SWAP RSS MEMORY TIME CPU PROJECT
10 5 6660K 17M 1.1% 0:00:00 0.3% group.staff
0 59 170M 116M 7.5% 0:01:13 0.1% system
3 1 320K 1860K 0.1% 0:00:00 0.0% default
This is extremely handy, frequent commands with a single key!
