· by bitprophet.social.coop.ap.brid.gy ·13h ago · view on bsky.app ↗

Original post on social.coop (social.coop)

#TIL: many common #Unix / #Linux shells use $_ as shorthand for "last parameter/argument to previously executed command" (eg, in zsh, equivalent to !!:$) Knowing that would have saved me quite a lot of time, better late than never! (also: story of being a CLI user…the rabbit hole /always/ goes […]

#linux #til #unix

2 comments — live from bluesky

Jeff Forcier · 0 · 12h ago

FTR, IIRC, prior to discovering $_ my habit has largely been: - hit up arrow to load previous command - left arrow a few times to beginning of last word (yea…I should build an Opt-b habit here, or try vi-style line editing again) - Ctrl-u to nuke back to beginning of line from there - type out […]

Chris Siebenmann · 0 · 2h ago

@bitprophet Readline has this as a native feature, as either M-. or M-_ (and maybe it got that binding from $_). If you want the first argument, that's M-C-y. (And then there's using these with M-<digit> to get the digit'th argument but ugh, numeric arguments in readline are something that's […]

Jeff Forcier · 0 · 13h ago

Thanks, random #Gentoo wiki page I was on while trying to remember how ebuilds are formatted. For some godforsaken reason I thought they were based on Python, but that's probably Portage-the-software; they're shell, like Arch's PKGBUILDs. Alas. Why everyone so friggin horny for programming in […]

Gabriele Svelto · 0 · 11h ago

@bitprophet you made me wonder, I've used Gentoo for 20+ years and never thought about the origin of the command names. There's also equery so I'd be inclined to think that it's indeed always <e+verb> rather than <noun>

Jeff Forcier · 0 · 11h ago

@gabrielesvelto yea, to be clear, I had the revelation on being reminded there's several e-verbs in the ecosystem. ebuild, eclass, equery etc. Also in reading up on portage/ebuilds a little more, one sees reference to the "merge" action as the final step - the typical fetch/patch/build/install […]

Jeff Forcier · 0 · 11h ago

@gabrielesvelto Also wondering where the "e" comes from, I strongly suspect how Gentoo's first incarnation was actually called Enoch Linux. Either that or turn-of-the-century "let's just slap e-for-electronic in front of everything, like e-mail" branding…which seems less likely for a Linux distro 🤣