I’ve paired a few times with my colleague Phil Potter over the last couple of weeks and since he’s a bit of a ninja with bash shortcuts/commands I wanted to record some of the things he’s shown me so I won’t forget them!

Let’s say we’re in the '/tmp' directory and want to create a folder a few levels down but forget to pass the '-p' option to 'mkdir':

One way of fixing that would be to press the up arrow and navigate along the previous command and put in the '-p' flag but it’s a bit fiddly so instead we can do the following:

The '^' allows us to replace any parts of the previous command and then run it again, so we could actually make that more concise if we wanted to:

Reasonably frequently after we’ve created a folder like this we’ll want to create a file inside it. '!$' comes in handy here as it allows us to refer to the last argument passed to the last command:

If we decide to remove that file and want to check it’s been deleted we can run the following:

The ':h' modifier removes the file name and leaves the rest of the file path alone.

We can expand the value of '!$' or any other command by typing 'Esc' followed by '^' (Shift 6):

Esc + ^

If we get carried away with modifiers we could also fix that first 'mkdir' command by making use of the 'substitution' modifier:

There’s not really any reason I can think of why you’d want to use that when you can use the initial '^' approach though!

I came across this blog post which explains how to do this type of thing and much more in the bash shell - worth a read!