Use Alt+. To Print Out Last Parameter

27th June 2008 - 2 minutes read time

A handy trick when using a Unix/Linux system is to repeat the last parameter from the previous line. Lets say that you typed in the following line to move a file to another directory.

$ mv file.txt /usr/local/

To then move into that directory you can just type cd and Alt+. to copy in the last parameter used in the last line. This will put the following on the command line.

$ cd /usr/local/

You can press Alt+. multiple times to go back through your parameter history. Note that it only records the last parameter used for each line. So for the example above, if you pressed Alt+. twice you would get the last parameter of whatever command you executed before moving the file.

linux

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