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

Runs Previous Command with Replace

By  on  

For some reason most of my typos happen within iTerm, which is kind of funny when you consider most commands are super short.  gut push doesn't do what I want, nor does hg ammend or any other command spelled wrong.  Then you have to either retype the whole thing or press the up key, place the cursor in the right spot, then update the bad text.  Blah.

I recently learned a cool trick for executing the previous command but with a text replacement shortcut:

# `gut push` -- Oooops!
^gut^git   # Replaces "gut" with "git" and executes previous command!

# `hg ammend` -- Oooops!
^ammend^amend

No need to retype and no need to fix the text within the entire command.  Neat way to save time and get things done!

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

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Ezra Free

    Really cool trick, David! Hadn’t come across this one yet. I’m the curious type so I just had to know what this is called, and any other details… It looks like after a little research that this is a Bash feature, and it’s called “quick substitution”. Its documented under the “Event Designators” section of Bash documentation:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Event-Designators

    The documentation specifies the usage as:

    ^string1^string2^

    But I just tried it out myself and it looks like it works just fine without the trailing caret character. By the way, it’s probably worth noting that this will only replace the first instance of “string1” in the command, so if you misspelled something twice in the command (seems unlikely, I know) you would have to use:

    !!:gs/string1/string2/
  2. caleb

    If you use zsh, you can enable auto-correction, so if you type

    gut commit -a

    then it will say

    zsh: correct 'gut' to 'git' [nyae]?
  3. ishan

    This is a great tip.

    P.S. Lately, most of my php/css/js related google searches have been showing your site near the top. I have picked up a lot of new things from your site. Whatever you are doing with SEO and content, it is amazing.

    All the best.
    PPS. I hope one day your have email newsletters.

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