Master Linux History Expansion: 8 Powerful ‘!’ Command Tricks

1. Run a command by its history number

List the command history with history. Each line is prefixed with a number. To re‑execute a specific entry, type !N where N is the line number.

history

!58

2. Run a recent command by relative offset

The !-n syntax refers to the command n lines back from the current prompt. !-1 repeats the last command, !-2 the one before that, and so on.

!-3

!-6

3. Reuse the last argument of the previous command

!$

expands to the final argument of the most recent command. This is handy when you need to feed the same path or filename into a different command.

ls /home/linuxmi/snap

ls -l !$

4. Access specific arguments of a previous command

Several shortcuts exist for extracting arguments from the most recent command: !^ – first argument !$ – last argument !cmd:n – the n ‑th argument of the most recent command that started with

cmd

!*

– all arguments

Example with cp:

cp /home/linuxmi/linuxmi.go /home/linuxmi/go

echo "first argument: !^"

echo "second argument: !cp:2"

5. Run the most recent command that matches a pattern

Prefix ! with a string to search the history for the latest command that begins with that string. The matched command is executed as‑is.

!ls

!ls -l

!ls -la

!ls -lA

6. Repeat the previous command with !!

!!

expands to the entire previous command line. It can be combined with redirection, pipes, or other shell constructs.

ip addr show | grep inet | grep -v 'inet6' | grep -v '127.0.0.1' | awk '{print $2}' | cut -f1 -d/

!! > ip.txt

When a command must be re‑executed with elevated privileges, !! can be embedded in su -c or sudo:

su -c "!!" root

7. Exclude files from globbing with extended pattern matching

Enable Bash extended globbing ( shopt -s extglob) and use !(pattern) to match everything except the given pattern.

rm !(important_file.txt)

rm !(*.pdf)

8. Test for directory existence

Use the test operator [ ! -d DIR ] together with logical AND ( &&) or OR ( ||) to perform actions based on the presence of a directory.

[ ! -d /home/linuxmi/linuxmi.com ] && printf '
no such /home/linuxmi/linuxmi.com directory
' || printf '
/home/linuxmi/linuxmi.com directory exists
'

[ ! -d /home/linuxmi/linuxmi.com ] && exit

[ ! -d /home/linuxmi/linuxmi.com ] && mkdir /home/linuxmi/linuxmi.com

These history‑expansion features are native to Bash; other shells may implement them differently or not at all.