How to use arguments from previous command?

Question

I know that Esc + . gives you the last argument of the last command.

But I\'m interested in first argument of the last command. Is there a key

Answer 1

Basically it has a use in yanking previous (command's) arguments.

For instance, if the following command is issued:

echo Hello, world how are you today?

then, Hello, will be the first argument, and today? the sixth, that is the last one; meaning it can be referenced by typing:

Alt+6 followed by Ctrl-Alt-6

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Ctrl is traditionally denoted as a hat character ^ prepended to keys names, and Alt as M- that is Meta prefix.

So the above shortcut can be redefined as ^My to yank.

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Also, there is hats substitution shortcut in the command line:

echo Hello, world!

^Hello^Bye

Bye, world!

to substitute the previous command's first matched string, meaning:

Hello, world! Hello, people!

^Hello^Bye

would result in:

Bye, world! Hello, people!

leaving the second match (hello) unchanged.

Note: Do not leave space between hats, or the operation won't work.

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The above is just a shortcut for:

!:s/Hello/Bye

event-level(*) substitution for the first found (matched) string in the previous command, while prefixing the first part with the g switch will apply to the whole line globally:

echo Hello, world! Hello, people!

!:gs/Hello/Bye

Bye, world! Bye, people!

as usually being done in other related commands such as sed, vi, and in regex (regular expression) - a standart way to search (match string).

No, you can't do !:sg/Hello/Bye or !:s/Hello/Bye/g here, that's the syntax!

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• ! is for events; event might be understood as command output or operation done in the commands history.

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That's what I understood by using it myself and trying things on my own from what I read from various sources including manual pages, blogs, and forums.

Hope it will shed some light into mysterious ways of bash, the Bourne-Again shell (a play on sh shell, which itself is called Bourne shell after its inventor's last name), what is default shell in many distributions including servers (server OS's).