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Saturday, May 2, 2009

A surefire shortcut to Insert the Last Argument of the Last Command

Sometimes, in the Linux command-line world, a seemingly trivial technique can turn out to be tremendously useful. Before I discover the Alt-dot(.) shortcut, I type !$ to insert the last argument of the previous command.

peter@tiger:~$ ls -l Windows_20081110102654.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 peter peter 808 2008-11-10 10:26 Windows_20081110102654.log
peter@tiger:~$ cat !$
cat Windows_20081110102654.log
.....
.....
peter@tiger:~$

Then, I discovered that typing Alt-dot achieves the same result. That is, press (and hold) the Alt key, then the dot key.

There are some advantages of using Alt-dot over !$. First, you can actually see the argument immediately and interactively. You can verify that is indeed what you want, edit it if necessary, before you continue the command-line input, and eventually hit Enter to execute the command. With !$, you better have a pretty good memory.

Another advantage is that you can repeatedly type Alt-dot. The net effect is that you scroll back in command history, and display the last argument of each successive command.

After assimilating the shortcut into my command-line work habit, I found that I have been using it a lot. Give it a try!

PS Related entries from this blog:

7 comments:

  1. rrpMay 2, 2009 at 3:52 PM

    Thanks for the tip - very useful

    ReplyDelete
  2. Paul MohrMay 2, 2009 at 4:30 PM

    That is truly awesome. Thanks for the tip.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousMay 3, 2009 at 12:41 AM

    What they said :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. MilossMay 3, 2009 at 3:00 AM

    Sounds nice.. but won't work in my uxterm.

    It works in Konsole, but I'm trying to avoid local access to that machine (using remote instead - ssh)

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousMay 4, 2009 at 7:15 PM

    Damn, so useful, but I wasn't aware of it, I didn't wonder if such a functionality exists!

    ReplyDelete
  6. AprilCoolsDayMay 13, 2009 at 9:52 AM

    It seems you don't know this:

    Add the following line to ~/.bashrc,

    bind Space:magic-space

    Now, whenever you press space after !$, it reveals its content. it also works for other expansions like !*, !!, !cat.

    Anybody who's gonna introduce !$ or !! to his/her coworker should also mention magic-space.

    ReplyDelete
  7. CurtisJuly 24, 2011 at 5:26 PM

    Great tip, thank you.

    I'm not sure about other terminals, but you can achieve the same by pressing [ESC] and then [.] in PuTTy.

    ReplyDelete