Bash Quick Substitution

One thing that I love about bash is that there is never a shortage of new tips and tricks to learn. I have been using bash for over 10 years now and just stumbled on this little trick.

This one (as the title implies) allows you to quickly substitute a string into the previous command and rerun the command with the substitution.

Quick substitution is officially part of the Bash Event Designators mechanism and is a great way to fix a typo from a previous command. Below is an example.

# Simple example to highlight substitutions
echo foo

# This will replace the string "foo" with "bar" and rerun the last command
^foo^bar

This shorthand notation is great for most use cases, with the exception of needing to replace multiple instances of a given string. Luckily that is easily addressed with the Event Designators expanded substitution syntax, shown below.

# This will substitute ALL occurrences of foo in the previous command
!!:gs/foo/bar/

# Slightly different syntax allows you to do the same thing in ZSH
^foo^bar^:G

The syntax is slightly more complicated in the first example but should be familiar enough to anyone that has used sed and/or vim substitutions, and the second example is almost identical to the shorthand substitution.

fc

Taking things one step further, we can actually edit the previous command to fix anything more than a typo of different argument. fc is actually a bash builtin function so it is available almost everywhere.

fc is especially useful for dealing with very long, complicated commands.

# Oops, we messed this up
echo fobarr | grep bar

# To fix it, just open the above in your default editor
fc

# when you write and quit the file it will put the contents into your current command

There are many great tutorials available so I would recommend looking around to see all the options and get more ideas.