Use The Past To Conquer The Future - History Substitution
Since I had to get really close with bash recently and found myself typing the same things over and over again, I decided to open the amazing toolbox called “History Substitution” and was amazed by how much you can do with it. It’s a feature built into bash that allows you to get commands and arguments from your history.
In this How-To I hope to be able to share this amazement with you! So let’s go!
1. Introduction
A long time ago, the Grandmaster who taught me Linux brought a small detail to my attention.
It went a little something like this:
Me: apt update
$ apt update: permission denied
Me: sudo apt upda …
Him: wait! I shall teach you …
$ sudo !!
sudo apt update
Suffice to say, my mind was blown!
After learning this, I used it as often as I could, not realizing that this rabbit hole went even deeper than I imagined.
2. Down the hole we go
In our daily life with bash we often come across situations like this:
less /this/path/is/really/long/and/annoying/randomfile
Now if we’re done looking at the file and want to open it in vi we have to:
press the up arrow → pos1 → del/del/del/del → vi
which is ok but still a pain in the butt if we have to do it more than once in our entire lifetime.
Instead with history subsitution we can just do:
vi !!$
So how does this work?
As you may have noticed by now, to start a history substitution command you begin with two exclamation points.
Given only two consecutive exclamation points returns the whole last command.
If we use history substitution with other options we can always omit the second exclamation point.
When used with a dollar sign it returns only the last argument.
The other way around, an exclamation point followed by a circumflex (this thing → ^ ) takes only the first argument.
Let’s look at some examples with “echo a b c” as the last command used:
!! → echo a b c
echo !! → echo echo a b c
echo !$ → echo c
echo !^ → echo a
echo !* → echo a b c
The first command above would also execute it immediately.
Notice that the two exclamations points also get the command and the one with ^ ignores it.
To get all arguments but not the command, the asterisk is used.
Additionally you can get specific arguments using a colon, in this context it’s called the word designator:
echo !:0 → echo echo
echo !:2 → echo b
echo !:2-3 → echo b c
echo !:2* → echo b c
echo !:1 !:3 → echo a c
But let’s say that you had to run a different command in the meantime and the things you need are not in the last command anymore. This is also easily done by telling it “how long ago” the command was used.
$ echo a b c
$ echo d e f
!-1 → echo d e f
!-2 → echo a b c
This is very helpful when using them in quick succession but nigh impossible to keep track of over longer sessions. In those cases it’s a lot easier to use the built-in string function.
$ uname -r
$ uname -a
$ echo a b c
echo !un → echo uname -a
echo !un:* → echo -a
echo !?nam → echo uname -a
echo !?me -r? → echo uname -r
As we can see, only giving it the beginning of the command it automatically looks for the first occurence (going upwards) in the history and returns it. Using the question marks we can look for parts inside the command to further narrow it down and filter alike commands.
Now onto paths!
Another great feature built into this, is the path handling.
It requires some getting used to but is also very straightforward.
let’s assume we have this path:
/home/user/folder/file.txt
This is what we can do:
Get the path up to file:
echo !:h → /home/user/folder
Get the filename plus extension:
echo !:t → file.txt
Get the path up to file extension:
echo !:r → /home/user/folder/file
Get only file extension:
echo !:e → .txt
Get only filename:
echo !:t:r → file
Substitution!
We can also substitute certain strings with other strings.
For example if we have /path/file1 and we want to change file1 to file2 we do:
!:s/file1/file2
But this only works on the first occurence found!
If we want to do this globally, so for every occurence of file1, we use:
!:gs/file1/file2
Example:
$ cp /path/file1 /path/folder/file1
!:gs/file1/file2 → cp /path/file2 /path/folder/file2
If you want to repeat a successful substitution in a different context then you don’t need to write it again.
You can just use:
!:& → for single occurence substitution
!:g& → for global substitution
3. Summary
Summary/Cheat-Sheet
!! → execute last command
!$ → return last argument
!^ → return first argument
!* → return all arguments
!:n → return the string on nth position
!:n-x → return position n to x
!:n* → return all arguments starting with n
!n → execute command with history number n
!-n → exectue command that was run n commands back
!?str → execute first command (going up) that matches str
!?str? → execute first command (going up) that contains str
!:h → return path up to bas filename
!:t → return only base filename
!:r → return path up to extension
!:e → return only extension
!:s/str1/str2 → substitute first occurence of str1 with str2
!:gs/str1/str2 → substitute all occurences of str1 with str2
!:& → repeat last successful substitution
!:g& → repeat last successful substitution and make it global
!:p→ don’t execute, print only
4. Extras
- If you missed it in the summary, you can only print the return value of the history substitution without executing it by using
!:p - Of course you can connect all of these to do some crazy things!
- To use this feature in bash scripts, supply it with
set -H - To run a command and not have it in the history, just type a space in front of it! This works for any command, not just history substitution.
And that’s all! If you have any questions or found a mistake just leave a comment below.
I sincerely hope you were able to learn something new today and if you already knew about it then I hope I was able to refresh your memory! 
Maybe poisoning the bash_history with evil commands? idk