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I looked at this question and googled, but can't find a definitive answer. What does !$ do when typed into terminal?

I typed

mkdir /path/to/dir
cd !$

Which brought me to /path/to/dir but I still would like to know exactly what the !$ operator does in general.

Community
  • 1
myol
  • 313

1 Answers1

8

From Bash Manual > History Expansion:

  • Event Designator

    !      Start a history substitution, except when followed by 
       a blank, newline, carriage return, = or  (  (when the 
       extglob shell option is enabled using the shopt builtin).
!n     Refer to command line n.

  • Word Designators

    $      The  last word.  This is usually the last argument, but will 
       expand to the zeroth word if there is only one word in the line.

So, !$ just repeats the last word from previous command

Example:

$ echo Unix and Linux
Unix and Linux
$ echo !$
echo Linux
Linux


$ cat dir1
cat: dir1: Is a directory
$ cd !$
cd dir1

After executing command with !$, press ↑ and you will get the result of !$.

Pandya
  • 24,618
  • Oh! I found the question is duplicate of http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/88642/what-does-mean (flagged to close) – Pandya Jan 11 '16 at 10:23