You are hereUsing previous command arguments in a new line

Using previous command arguments in a new line

By thomas - Posted on 12 January 2012

A friend of mine was talking about his design for a shell that would allow you to programatically reuse arguments. I started looking and found that bash can do this but not programatically (at least as far as I know). The syntax was slighty confusing but here is the summary, it blew my mind when I started using it (but I'll probably forget it again soon enough, like all the awesome things you can do in vi if you can remember...)

Here goes, lets copy a file from a deeply nested path to our location by first tab-completing the filename with ls

[thomas@host ~]$ ls /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/mathdesign/mdput/ts1mdput.fd 
/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/mathdesign/mdput/ts1mdput.fd

Now type cp on the new line and then Meta-Control-y
(That is, hold down Meta, Control and then type y ((hopefully you know where your Meta key is, on my keyboard it's the left-alt)))
[thomas@host ~]$ cp /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/mathdesign/mdput/ts1mdput.fd .

Cool, now what about a line with many arguments:

[thomas@host ~]$ ls /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/mathdesign/mdput/ts1mdput.fd /usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/plgraph/picture.tex /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/gnuplottex/gnuplottex.sty 
/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/gnuplottex/gnuplottex.sty  /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/mathdesign/mdput/ts1mdput.fd  /usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/plgraph/picture.tex

To get the last argument, type cp then Meta-.

[thomas@host ~]$ cp /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/gnuplottex/gnuplottex.sty .

Now the one that was somwhat tricky to get would be how to change the argument number

[thomas@host ~]$ ls /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/mathdesign/mdput/ts1mdput.fd /usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/plgraph/picture.tex /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/gnuplottex/gnuplottex.sty 
/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/gnuplottex/gnuplottex.sty  /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/mathdesign/mdput/ts1mdput.fd  /usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/plgraph/picture.tex

To get the second argument: Meta-2 then (without letting go of Meta) Meta-Control-y

[thomas@host ~]$ ls /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/mathdesign/mdput/ts1mdput.fd /usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/plgraph/picture.tex /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/gnuplottex/gnuplottex.sty 
/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/gnuplottex/gnuplottex.sty
/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/mathdesign/mdput/ts1mdput.fd
/usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/plgraph/picture.tex
(arg: 2) ls 
[thomas@host ~]$ ls /usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/plgraph/picture.tex
/usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/plgraph/picture.tex

Tags
nice
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 01/13/2012 - 17:01.

good work

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