If I need a repeat of a command, I simply repeat the alias.

This only makes sense if you make an alias for every command you ever use…which sounds like a lot of pointless labor. I don’t use bash history anymore, though, because I use fish, and it can autofill your commands without having to do a search through history. Much easier.

Here’s another trick you obviously don’t know

You presume too much. I didn’t create this comic. I’ve heard the debate around pros and cons of metasyntactic variables, and I think there are good points on both sides. Typically, when I want to use an example, I try to use a specific case, because it makes it more memorable, but I’ve actually had somebody get more confused by that, so I guess you can’t make everybody happy.

My question is: Are you confused by algebra? Like, when you see “2 + X = 5”, do you say “I can’t solve this! WTF is X??? What does it mean?”

The “touch” file looks more useful for a loop where multiple files with different timestamps must be created. For a single use this is a lot harder to remember than command > /path/to/filename.txt

I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Do you know what touch does? Also, no, it isn’t easier to look up the timestamp and manually type it in, even if it’s just one file. This was really about using $(), not touch, anyway.

Finally, I’d appreciate a shortcut to stop the execution of a command because sometimes Ctrl+C works, but sometimes it doesn’t and instead Ctrl+Z works in its place. If there’s a univeral shortcut to cancel the execution of any command, that would be way more useful, IMO.

This is one of the quirks of Unix and Unix-like systems. I was reading something about this recently. I think that it has to do with how programs are written and how they interact with the shell. CTRL-C is used by the shell, but some programs use CTRL-Z instead. So, I think that some programs override the shell or something like that?