Bash is a ubiquitous tool. It’s on more and more machines every day. Even Windows (with WSL) has a full Linux environment, and most default to a bash shell. Most people I watch on Twitch can get around, but I’ve been hearing on podcasts that folks are learning little “secrets” of bash which I thought to be common knowledge, so I want to share them. This post is about using and manipulating previous commands.
Let’s start with basics. Up arrow populates your command with previous commands you’ve run, that seems commonly known.
One of my most frequently used features is Ctrl+r. Ctrl+r searches through
your previous commands to re-execute them. One common work flow for me is to
restart the web container in Docker Compose. Hit Ctrl+r then type
restart, this usually populates my command with docker compose restart web.
The history command is fairly common, too. history | grep dapr to see all
the previous dapr commands. But we’re going to one-up this knowledge:
$ history | grep dapr
2409 gh repo clone exegeteio/dapr-mini-api
2410 cd dapr-mini-api
2421 dapr run -a dapr-mini-api-sub --app-port 5000 dotnet watch run
$ echo !2421
dapr run -a dapr-mini-api-sub --app-port 5000 dotnet watch run
Notice the numbers down the left of history? That is the id of the command.
You can retrieve any of the commands in your history by entering a bang (bang
means !) and the id. In the previous example, I pulled back up command
2421, and echoed it. There are lots of these bang variables:
$ gh repo clone exegeteio/dapr-mini-api
$ echo !! # Entire previous command.
gh repo clone exegeteio/dapr-mini-api
$ echo !$ # Last argument of previous command
exegeteio/dapr-mini-api
$ echo !gh # Last invocation of the `gh` command.
gh repo clone exegeteio/dapr-mini-api
$ echo !* # Arguments from last command
repo clone exegeteio/dapr-mini-api
Pretty sneaky, right? If you use a fancy shell like zsh (the default in MacOS,
so my default now, too), hitting tab after any of those bang variables will
expand them inline for editing before running.