Why Does the Exclamation Mark `!` Sometimes Upset Bash?

bashcommand historyquoting

I realize that ! has special significance on the commandline in the context of the commandline history, but aside from that, in a runing script the exclamation mark can sometimes cause a parsing error.
I think it has something to do with an event, but I have no idea what an event is or what it does.  Even so, the same command can behave differently in different situations.
The last example, below, causes an error; but why, when the same code worked outside of the command substitution? .. using GNU bash 4.1.5 

# This works, with or without a space between ! and p
  { echo -e "foo\nbar" | sed -nre '/foo/! p'
    echo -e "foo\nbar" | sed -nre '/foo/!p'; }
# bar
# bar

# This works, works when there is a space between ! and p
  var="$(echo -e "foo\nbar" | sed -nre '/foo/! p')"; echo "$var"
# bar

# This causes an ERROR, with NO space between ! and p
  var="$(echo -e "foo\nbar" | sed -nre '/foo/!p')"; echo "$var"
# bash: !p': event not found

Best Answer

The ! character invokes bash's history substitution (enabled by default in interactive shells). When followed by a string (as in your failing example) it tries to expand to the last history event that began with that string. Just like $var gets expanded to the value of that string, !echo would expand to the last echo command in your history.

Space is a breaking character in such expansions. First note how this would work with variables:

# var="like"
# echo "$var"
like
# echo "$"
$
# echo "Do you $var frogs?"
Do you like frogs?       <- as expected, variable name broken at space
# echo "Do you $varfrogs?"
Do you?                  <- $varfrogs not defined, replaced with blank
# echo "Do you $ var frogs?"
Do you $ var frogs?      <- $ not a valid variable name, ignored

The same thing will happen for history expansion. The bang character (!) starts off a history replacement sequence, but only if followed by a string. Following it with a space make it literal bang instead of part of a replace sequence.

You can avoid this kind of replacement for both variable and history expantion by using single quotes. Your first examples used single quotes and so ran fine. Your last examples are in double quotes and thus bash scanned them for expantion sequences before it did anything else. The only reason the first one didn't trip is that that the space is a break character as shown above.

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