[clug] Favourite shell one liner

Brendan Jurd direvus at gmail.com
Tue Dec 20 21:14:46 MST 2011


On 20 December 2011 21:46, Hal Ashburner <hal at ashburner.info> wrote:
> Hi Clug!
>
> What's your favourite* shell** one liner?

Not technically a one-liner, but just a nice little trick in bash that
I have recently started using.

Ever entered a shell command and then realised you actually wanted to
do something just a little bit different from what you typed?

^foo^bar

Substitutes the first 'foo' with 'bar' in the most recently entered
command in your history, and then executes the result.

Real world example:

$ ls /path/to/file

Okay, I've checked that it exists, now I want to edit it:

$ ^ls^vim

Also good for correcting typos without having to fool around with
arrow keys, or M-b and M-f.

Cheers,
BJ


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