leah blogs

February 2008

29feb2008 · 10 zsh tricks you may not know...

…yet, that is. Or if you do, you read the man page pretty well. :-)

zsh has gazillions of features, but I think these are pretty useful for daily use:

  1. ESC-. inserts the last argument of the previous history line, repeat to go back in history. (Same in Bash.)
  2. ESC-' quotes the whole line. (Useful for su -c or ssh).
  3. ESC-q clears the line and inserts it again on the next prompt, allowing you to issue an interim command.
  4. <(command) returns the filename (in /dev/fd if supported or as a FIFO) of the pipe given by command for reading. (For example, use diff <(ruby foo.rb) <(ruby-1.9 foo.rb) to compare two program outputs).
  5. cd old new substitutes old with new once in the pwd and chdirs there.
  6. !$ expands to the previous history line’s last argument, !^ expands to the first argument, !:n to the n-th argument.
  7. =foo expands to the full path of foo in the PATH (like which foo).
  8. for src in *.c do ... done can be abbreviated to for src (*.c) { ... } (which is actually memorizable). You can even drop the curly braces if you don’t have ; in the command.
  9. <42-69> globs numbers between 42 and 69. Drop the number(s) to make it open-valued. {42..69} expands to the numbers between 42 and 69.
  10. *** expands recursively like **, but follows symbolic links.
  11. Addition! ESC-RETURN inserts a literal newline, so you can edit longer commands easily.

More tricks:

Happy hacking.

NP: Shriekback—Mistah Linn He Dead

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