tip

A few zsh tricks

Here are a few zsh tricks that I learned (and enjoy using) recently:

The basics - use !! to retrieve last command

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tail /var/log/message
!!

The not so basic - get last parameter of last command with !$

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mkdir new_folder
cd !$	# after this command you will be in folder new_folder

Get all parameters from the last command with !*

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diff src/file1 dest/
cp !*

The pretty awsome - substitution with !!:s/from/to or !!:gs/from/to

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vi src/en/file.txt
!!:s/en/fr
diff src/en/file.txt dest/en/file.txt
!!:gs/en/fr        # g for global substitution

Even better with ^

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vi src/en/file.txt
^en^fr

diff src/en/file.txt dest/en/file.txt
^en^fr^:G

Switching between directories with similar structure (added Dec 7, 2013)

let’s say you are in ~/dev/myproject1/src/lib/, and you want to cd to ~/dev/myproject2/src/lib/, all you need to do is

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cd myproject1 myproject2

or even

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cd 1 2

Batch renaming with zmv

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autoload zmv
zmv '(*).txt' '$1.dat'	# change *.txt to *.dat

see more zmv examples at http://zshwiki.org/home/builtin/functions/zmv