Peeking inside the bash rabbit hole

I have much bigger issues to be concerned with than saving a few seconds of typing with obscure bash features. But precisely because I have bigger issues on my plate, it’s fun to take a moment and solve some little tangible problem. The shell !$ saves the last part of the latest command. (Mnemonic: bang often refers to commands, such as !! to redo the previous command, and cash often refers to the last of something, such as the end of a line in a regular expression.) This comes in handy, for example, when you copy a file to a directory and then want to cd into that directory. cp myfile /big/long/path cd !$ The !$ variable is fragile, however. The sequence of commands cp myfile /big/long/path ls cd !$ won’t work because after running ls the variable !$ now contains “ls” rather than “/big/long/path”. There are two ways to fix this. In the previous example you could change the last command to cd !-2:$ This says go back two commands (!-2) and extract (:) the last argument ($). Another…

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