Bash – How to apply caret-substitution to the nth-last command

bashcommand line

I regularly find myself having to execute a lengthy command on a file, then process the results with other commands. To process the next file, I usually rerun the same command by hitting the Up key until I find the command I want and arduously replace the old filename with the new filename.

Is there a way to combine caret substitution (^oldfile^newfile) with the n th-last command? I have (unsuccessfully) tried to pipe the n th-last command into the substitution like so:

$ !-4 | ^old^new

Of course, I am open to other suggestions. These little shortcuts really help with productivity…

Best Answer

You can't do it with a quick substitution directly, because ^foo^bar is shorthand for:

!!:s/foo/bar/

The !! part (which refers to the last command) isn't part of the quick syntax (that's what makes it quick), but you can use the longer syntax directly and then modify the !! to whatever you want:

!-4:s/foo/bar/

I explained as much of the history syntax as I know in this post; the last section includes the :s modifier

Related Solutions

Bash Autocomplete – Autocomplete Newest File

Just remove the vim from the alias. Do something like this:

alias latest='ls -tr | tail -n 1'

You can then use any program to open the latest files:

emacs `latest`
ls `latest`
mv `latest` ../

etc.

However, this will break if your file names have spaces or weird characters which is why you should never parse ls. A better way would be something like this (add this to your .bashrc) :

function latest(){
  $1 "$(find . -type f -printf "%C@ %p\n" | sort | tail -n 1 | cut -d " " -f 2-)"
}

This function will execute whatever command you give it as an argument and pass the result of the find call (the latest file) to that command. So, you can do things like:

latest emacs
latest less

If you need to be able to do things like mv $(latest) foo/ try this one instead:

function latest(){
   A=(${@})
   prog=$1;
   lat=$(find . -type f -printf "%C@ %p\n" | sort | tail -n 1 | cut -d " " -f 2-)
   if [ ! -z $2 ] ; then 
     args=${A[@]:1}; 
     $prog "$lat" "${A[@]:1}"
   else
     $prog "$lat"
   fi
}

Then, to copy the latest file to bar/, you would do

latest cp bar

And you can still do latest emacs in the same way as before.

Bash – Use Netrw or Nerdtree in Zsh/Bash to select a file BY BROWSING

You basically already know the answer from here. It's quite easy to put this all together like this:

function insert_files() {
    vifm -f < /dev/tty > /dev/tty

    while read l; do
        LBUFFER+="'$l' "
    done < ~/.vifm/vimfiles

    zle reset-prompt
}
zle -N insert_files
bindkey '^t' insert_files

I'm not a zsh-user, so I stole structure of the code from answer by Lucas. As for bash, I was looking once for a way to process output of external command inside shortcut, but didn't find one.

Demonstration

P.S. My code contains quite primitive escaping, you might want to improve that and maybe change the way spacing is added between arguments.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash Autocomplete – Autocomplete Newest File

Bash – Use Netrw or Nerdtree in Zsh/Bash to select a file BY BROWSING

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