Give me that one command you wish you knew years ago caught my eye yesterday, and I thought I’d tell you one of my favorite little commands in the bash: it’s called fc (fix command), and it is described in the manual, of course.

fc selects commands from the bash history, and by using an alias on it, I can quickly repeat the last command line which begins with a particular string. An example:

I submit a longish command:

$ dig +noall +answer +norec @k.root-servers.net . soa
...

If I want to repeat that later, I use

$ r dig
dig +noall +answer +norec @k.root-servers.net . soa
...

which searches backwards in the shell’s history for the first command which begins with the string I specify. (r d would have sufficed, because I haven’t used any other command later which begins with a d.) The full command line is printed to stdout and then executed. (This is like what ! does, but I prefer my ! undiluted, so I disable that by setting histchars=''.)

r is an alias I set up like this:

export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
alias r='fc -e -'

HISTCONTROL defines how bash saves history entries: ignoreboth is a combination of ignorespace (lines which start with a space) and ignoredups (ignore duplicates). The latter is important for the following situation: Suppose I’m waiting for a particular output, and I repeat the command in series:

$ r dig
...
$ r dig
...
$ r dig
...

By setting ignoredups I ensure duplicate commands are not saved in the shell’s history.

Give it a try, and while you’re at it, try the v while you’re in bash’ editing mode. :-)