Seven God-Like Bash History Shortcuts You Will Actually Use
source link: https://zwischenzugs.com/2019/08/25/seven-god-like-bash-history-shortcuts-you-will-actually-use/
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Seven God-Like Bash History Shortcuts You Will Actually Use
zwischenzugs Uncategorized August 25, 2019July 13, 2020
4 Minutes
Intro
Most guides to bash history shortcuts exhaustively list all of the shortcuts available to you.
The problem I always had with that was that I would use them once, and then glaze over as I tried out all the possibilities. Then I’d move onto my working day and completely forget them, retaining only the well-known !!
trick I learned when I first started using bash.
So most never got committed to memory.
Here I outline the shortcuts I actually use every day. When people see me use them they often ask me “what the hell did you do there!?”, conferring God-like status on me with minimal effort or intelligence required.
I recommend using one a day for a week, then moving onto the next one. It’s worth taking your time to get them under your fingers, as the time you save will be significant in the long run.
1) !$
– The ‘Last Argument’ One
If you only take one shortcut from this article, make it this one.
It substitutes in the last argument of the last command into your line.
Consider this scenario:
$mv /path/to/wrongfile
/some/other/place
mv: cannot stat '/path/to/wrongfile': No such file or directory
Ach, I put the wrongfile
filename in my command. I should have put rightfile
instead.
You might decide to fully re-type the last command, and replace wrongfile
with rightfile
.
Instead, you can type:
$ mv /path/to/rightfile
!$
mv /path/to/rightfile /some/other/place
and the command will work.
There are other ways to achieve the above in bash with shortcuts, but this trick of re-using the last argument of the last command is one I use the most.
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2) !:2
– The ‘nth Argument’ One
Ever done anything like this?
$ tar -cvf afolder afolder.tar tar: failed to open
Like others, I get the arguments to tar
(and ln
) wrong more than I would like to admit:
When you mix up arguments like that, you can run:
$ !:0 !:1 !:3 !:2 tar -cvf afolder.tar afolder
and your reputation will be saved.
The last command’s items are zero-indexed, and can be substituted in with the number after the !:
.
Obviously, you can also use this to re-use specific arguments from the last command rather than all of them.
3) !:1-$
– The ‘All The Arguments’ One
Imagine you run a command, and realise that the arguments were correct, but
$ grep '(ping|pong)' afile
I wanted to match ping
or pong
in a file, but I used grep
rather than egrep
.
I start typing egrep
, but I don’t want to re-type the other arguments, so I can use the !:1-$
shortcut to ask for all the arguments to the previous command from the second one (remember they’re zero-indexed) to the last one (represented by the $
sign):
$ egrep !:1-$ egrep '(ping|pong)' afile ping
You don’t need to pick 1-$
, you can pick a subset like 1-2
, or 3-9
if you had that many arguments in the previous command.
If you like this, you might like one of my books:
Learn Bash the Hard Way
Learn Git the Hard Way
Learn Terraform the Hard Way
4) !-2:$
– The ‘Last But n‘ One
The above shortcuts are great when I know immediately how to correct my last command, but often I run commands after the orignal one which mean that the last command is no longer the one I want to reference.
For example, using the mv
example from before, if I follow up my mistake with an ls
check of the folder’s contents:
$ mv /path/to/wrongfile
/some/other/place
mv: cannot stat '/path/to/wrongfile': No such file or directory
$ ls /path/to/
rightfile
…I can no longer use the !$
shortcut.
In these cases, you can insert a -n:
(where n
is the number of commands to go back in the history) after the !
to grab the last argument from an older command:
$ mv /path/to/rightfile !-2:$ mv /path/to/rightfile /some/other/place
Again, once learned, you may be surprised at how often you need it.
5) !$:h
– The ‘Get Me The Folder’ One
This one looks less promising on the face of it, but is something I use dozens of times daily.
Imagine I run a command like this:
$ tar -cvf system.tar /etc/system tar: /etc/system: Cannot stat: No such file or directory tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
The first thing I might want to do is go to the /etc
folder to see what’s in there and work out what I’ve got wrong.
I can do this at a stroke with:
$ cd !$:h cd /etc
What this one does is say: get the last argument to the last command (/etc/system
), and take off its last filename component, leaving only the /etc
.
6) !#:1
– The ‘The Current Line’ One
I spent years occasionally wondering if I could reference an argument on the current line before finally looking it up and learning it. I wish I’d done so well before.
I most commonly use it to make backup files
$ cp /path/to/some/file !#:1.bak cp /path/to/some/file /path/to/some/file.bak
but once under the fingers it can be a very quick alternative to
7) !!:gs
– The ‘Search and Replace’ One
This one searches across the referenced command, and replaces what’s in the first two /
characters with what’s in the second two.
Say I want to tell the world that mys
key does not work, and outputs f
instead.
$ echo my f key doef not work my f key doef not work
Then I realise that I was just wrongly hitting the f
key by accident.
To replace all the f
s with s
es, I can type:
$ !!:gs/f /s / echo my s key does not work my s key does not work
It doesn’t just work on single characters. I can replace words or sentences too:
$ !!:gs/does/did/ echo my s key did not work my s key did not work
Just to show you how these shortcuts can be combined, can you work out what these toenail clippings will output?
$ ping !#:0:gs/i/o $ vi /tmp/!:0.txt $ ls !$:h $ cd !-2:h $ touch !$!-3:$ !! !$.txt $ cat !:1-$
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Published by zwischenzugs
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