The caret is mightier than the up arrow

I learned a fun bash trick about a week ago that I thought I would share. In a bash shell you can use the caret ^ symbol to find and replace a sequence of characters in your previous command.

For instance if you type:

sudo systemctl restart httpd

and then want to look at the status of the httpd service all you need to do is:

^restart^status

Bash will look at the last command in your history and replace the first occurrence of “restart” with “status” and run the new command.

Over the last week or so I’ve found that I get the most use out of this trick from my atrocious spelling. More often than not I spell “systemctl” as “systemclt”, or instead of “sudo something” I type “sodu something.” Using the caret syntax I can quickly fix my spelling mistakes in the command line without having to retype long strings  that had a couple of letters out of place.

The other thing this is useful for, is to show off your awesome command line skills and see the looks of adoration you get from your fellow Linuxy people. In fact, to be honest, that is probably the best reason to learn these kinds of things. 🙂

So next time you are about to press the up arrow and fix a spelling mistake, or change a command option try using the ^oldstring^newstring trick instead.

Till next time

— Luke

Luke has an RHCSA for Red Hat Enterpirse Linux 7 and currently works as a Linux Systems Adminstrator in Ohio.

This post, re-published here with permission, was originally published on Luke’s site here.