Replace Last Command in Shell

By  on  

Whether I fat-finger a command or my MacBook Pro keyboard's keys don't want to respond like they should, I'm frequently misspelling commands.  What's more frustrating is that many of these commands are long, taking making fixing theme time-consuming.

Luckily a Twitter follower is looking out for me, providing me a quick command for fixing the misspelled command:

~ $ crul davidwalsh.name
-bash: crul: command not found
~ $ ^crul^curl
curl davidwalsh.name
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="https://davidwalsh.name/">here</a>.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache Server at davidwalsh.name Port 80</address>
</body></html>

The ^ command usage above returns fixes the spelling from the previous command, executes the command, and as a bonus, adds the correct command to history.

Small tips like these and git checkout - make my command life experience so much better.  What's your favorite command line trick?

Recent Features

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer

    Regardless of your stance on pornography, it would be impossible to deny the massive impact the adult website industry has had on pushing the web forward. From pushing the browser's video limits to pushing ads through WebSocket so ad blockers don't detect them, you have...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Resize an Image Using Canvas, Drag and Drop and the File API

    Recently I was asked to create a user interface that allows someone to upload an image to a server (among other things) so that it could be used in the various web sites my company provides to its clients. Normally this would be an easy task—create a...

  • By
    Create Digg URLs Using PHP

    Digg recently came out with a sweet new feature that allows users to create Tiny Digg URLs which show a Digg banner at the top allowing easy access to vote for the article from the page. While I love visiting Digg every once in a...

Discussion

  1. Hi David,

    someone pointed me to https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck/blob/master/README.md last time I complained.

    Kind regards

    André

  2. Daniel

    Hi David,

    it works fine, but does not update bash’s history

    My favorite command is CTRL-R and reuse older commands

    Abrazos, Daniel

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!