Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

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?

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

  • By
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Drag and Drop Z-Index Stacking

    In an example for a previous post, I showed you how to use opacity during a drag'n'drop transaction. One bit I didn't account for was element stacking and bringing the most recent element to the top of the stack. To do...

  • By
    Web Audio API

    The Web Audio API allows developers to load and decode audio on demand using JavaScript.  The more I evaluate awesome games for Firefox OS TVs, the more I get to learn about these APIs that I normally wouldn't touch.  The following is a very basic introduction to the WebAudio API...

Discussion

  1. André Jaenisch

    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!