Master the history command and learn some interesting usage of the bash history feature in this tutorial.
  • smegEnglish
    61·
    4 months ago

    To use the last argument of the last ran command, use the Alt+. keys.

    Sounds like a poor-man’s !$ to me!

    • toynbee@lemmy.world
      4·
      4 months ago

      $_ also works. I love Alt+. but sadly it doesn’t work on any Mac terminal emulator I’ve found and, even more sadly, I am forced to use a Mac at work.

      I haven’t tried !$ so I’m not familiar with its function, but one nice thing about Alt+. is that you’re not limited to the last argument of the most recent command; instead, it allows you to scroll backwards like Ctrl+R.

    • sping@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      Fewer keystrokes, more features, and the ability to see what you’re about to do explicitly. How does that make it the poor man’s option?

      • smegEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Seems like it’s terminal-emulator-specific rather than a built-in shell feature

        • sping@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          2·
          4 months ago

          No, it’s a shell feature. Terminal emulators don’t even know what shell are running typically, and I haven’t heard of them adding shell features. That would require the terminal emulator knowing you’re using bash, knowing how to interrogate history etc…

          From man bash:

                 yank-last-arg (M-., M-_)
              Insert  the last argument to the previous command (the last word
              of the previous history entry).  With a numeric argument, behave
              exactly  like  yank-nth-arg.   Successive calls to yank-last-arg
              move back through the history list, inserting the last word  (or
              the  word  specified  by the argument to the first call) of each
              line in turn.  Any numeric argument supplied to these successive
              calls  determines  the direction to move through the history.  A
              negative argument switches the  direction  through  the  history
              (back or forward).  The history expansion facilities are used to
              extract the last word, as if the "!$" history expansion had been
              specified.
          • smegEnglish
            1·
            4 months ago

            Neat! Other replies saying it doesn’t work on their machine, I’ll have to try it out in a few different environments.