Bash history expansion

Posted on 2012-08-16 by Tom Ryder

Setting the Bash option histexpand allows some convenient typing shortcuts using Bash history expansion. The option can be set with either of these:

$ set -H
$ set -o histexpand

It’s likely that this option is already set for all interactive shells, as it’s on by default. The manual, man bash, describes these features as follows:

-H  Enable ! style history substitution. This option is on
    by default when the shell is interactive.

You may have come across this before, perhaps to your annoyance, in the following error message that comes up whenever ! is used in a double-quoted string, or without being escaped with a backslash:

$ echo "Hi, this is Tom!"
bash: !": event not found

If you don’t want the feature and thereby make ! into a normal character, it can be disabled with either of these:

$ set +H
$ set +o histexpand

History expansion is actually a very old feature of shells, having been available in csh before Bash usage became common.

This article is a good followup to Better Bash history, which among other things explains how to include dates and times in history output, as these examples do.

Basic history expansion

Perhaps the best known and most useful of these expansions is using !! to refer to the previous command. This allows repeating commands quickly, perhaps to monitor the progress of a long process, such as disk space being freed while deleting a large file:

$ rm big_file &
[1] 23608
$ du -sh .
3.9G    .
$ !!
du -sh .
3.3G    .

It can also be useful to specify the full filesystem path to programs that aren’t in your $PATH:

$ hdparm
-bash: hdparm: command not found
$ /sbin/!!
/sbin/hdparm

In each case, note that the command itself is printed as expanded, and then run to print the output on the following line.

History by absolute index

However, !! is actually a specific example of a more general form of history expansion. For example, you can supply the history item number of a specific command to repeat it, after looking it up with history:

$ history | grep expand
 3951  2012-08-16 15:58:53  set -o histexpand
$ !3951
set -o histexpand

You needn’t enter the !3951 on a line by itself; it can be included as any part of the command, for example to add a prefix like sudo:

$ sudo !3850

If you include the escape string \! as part of your Bash prompt, you can include the current command number in the prompt before the command, making repeating commands by index a lot easier as long as they’re still visible on the screen.

History by relative index

It’s also possible to refer to commands relative to the current command. To subtitute the second-to-last command, we can type !-2. For example, to check whether truncating a file with sed worked correctly:

$ wc -l bigfile.txt
267 bigfile.txt
$ printf '%s\n' '11,$d' w | ed -s bigfile.txt
$ !-2
wc -l bigfile.txt
10 bigfile.txt

This works further back into history, with !-3, !-4, and so on.

Expanding for historical arguments

In each of the above cases, we’re substituting for the whole command line. There are also ways to get specific tokens, or words, from the command if we want that. To get the first argument of a particular command in the history, use the !^ token:

$ touch a.txt b.txt c.txt
$ ls !^
ls a.txt
a.txt

To get the last argument, add !$:

$ touch a.txt b.txt c.txt
$ ls !$
ls c.txt
c.txt

To get all arguments (but not the command itself), use !*:

$ touch a.txt b.txt c.txt
$ ls !*
ls a.txt b.txt c.txt
a.txt  b.txt  c.txt

This last one is particularly handy when performing several operations on a group of files; we could run du and wc over them to get their size and character count, and then perhaps decide to delete them based on the output:

$ du a.txt b.txt c.txt
4164    a.txt
5184    b.txt
8356    c.txt
$ wc !*
wc a.txt b.txt c.txt
16689    94038  4250112 a.txt
20749   117100  5294592 b.txt
33190   188557  8539136 c.txt
70628   399695 18083840 total
$ rm !*
rm a.txt b.txt c.txt

These work not just for the preceding command in history, but also absolute and relative command numbers:

$ history 3
 3989  2012-08-16 16:30:59  wc -l b.txt
 3990  2012-08-16 16:31:05  du -sh c.txt
 3991  2012-08-16 16:31:12  history 3
$ echo !3989^
echo -l
-l
$ echo !3990$
echo c.txt
c.txt
$ echo !-1*
echo c.txt
c.txt

More generally, you can use the syntax !n:w to refer to any specific argument in a history item by number. In this case, the first word, usually a command or builtin, is word 0:

$ history | grep bash
 4073  2012-08-16 20:24:53  man bash
$ !4073:0
man
What manual page do you want?
$ !4073:1
bash

You can even select ranges of words by separating their indices with a hyphen:

$ history | grep apt-get
 3663  2012-08-15 17:01:30  sudo apt-get install gnome
$ !3663:0-1 purge !3663:3
sudo apt-get purge gnome

You can include ^ and $ as start and endpoints for these ranges, too. 3* is a shorthand for 3-$, meaning “all arguments from the third to the last.”

Expanding history by string

You can also refer to a previous command in the history that starts with a specific string with the syntax !string:

$ !echo
echo c.txt
c.txt
$ !history
history 3
 4011  2012-08-16 16:38:28  rm a.txt b.txt c.txt
 4012  2012-08-16 16:42:48  echo c.txt
 4013  2012-08-16 16:42:51  history 3

If you want to match any part of the command line, not just the start, you can use !?string?:

$ !?bash?
man bash

Be careful when using these, if you use them at all. By default it will run the most recent command matching the string immediately, with no prompting, so it might be a problem if it doesn’t match the command you expect.

Checking history expansions before running

If you’re paranoid about this, Bash allows you to audit the command as expanded before you enter it, with the histverify option:

$ shopt -s histverify
$ !rm
$ rm a.txt b.txt c.txt

This option works for any history expansion, and may be a good choice for more cautious administrators. It’s a good thing to add to one’s .bashrc if so.

If you don’t need this set all the time, but you do have reservations at some point about running a history command, you can arrange to print the command without running it by adding a :p suffix:

$ !rm:p
rm important-file

In this instance, the command was expanded, but thankfully not actually run.

Substituting strings in history expansions

To get really in-depth, you can also perform substitutions on arbitrary commands from the history with !!:gs/pattern/replacement/. This is getting pretty baroque even for Bash, but it’s possible you may find it useful at some point:

$ !!:gs/txt/mp3/
rm a.mp3 b.mp3 c.mp3

If you only want to replace the first occurrence, you can omit the g:

$ !!:s/txt/mp3/
rm a.mp3 b.txt c.txt

Stripping leading directories or trailing files

If you want to chop a filename off a long argument to work with the directory, you can do this by adding an :h suffix, kind of like a dirname call in Perl:

$ du -sh /home/tom/work/doc.txt
$ cd !$:h
cd /home/tom/work

To do the opposite, like a basename call in Perl, use :t:

$ ls /home/tom/work/doc.txt
$ document=!$:t
document=doc.txt

Stripping extensions or base names

A bit more esoteric, but still possibly useful; to strip a file’s extension, use :r:

$ vi /home/tom/work/doc.txt
$ stripext=!$:r
stripext=/home/tom/work/doc

To do the opposite, to get only the extension, use :e:

$ vi /home/tom/work/doc.txt
$ extonly=!$:e
extonly=.txt

Quoting history

If you’re performing substitution not to execute a command or fragment but to use it as a string, it’s likely you’ll want to quote it. For example, if you’ve just found through experiment and trial and error an ideal ffmpeg command line to accomplish some task, you might want to save it for later use by writing it to a script:

$ ffmpeg -f alsa -ac 2 -i hw:0,0 -f x11grab -r 30 -s 1600x900 \
> -i :0.0+1600,0 -acodec pcm_s16le -vcodec libx264 -preset ultrafast \
> -crf 0 -threads 0 "$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S)".mkv

To make sure all the escaping is done correctly, you can write the command into the file with the :q modifier:

$ echo '#!/usr/bin/env bash' >ffmpeg.sh
$ echo !ffmpeg:q >>ffmpeg.sh

In this case, this will prevent Bash from executing the command expansion "$(date ... )", instead writing it literally to the file as desired. If you build a lot of complex commands interactively that you later write to scripts once completed, this feature is really helpful and saves a lot of cutting and pasting.

Thanks to commenter Mihai Maruseac for pointing out a bug in the examples.

Bash prompts

Posted on 2012-07-09 by Tom Ryder

You can tell a lot about a shell user by looking at their prompt. Most shell users will use whatever the system’s default prompt is for their entire career. Under many GNU/Linux distributions, this prompt includes the username, the hostname, and the current working directory, along with a $ sigil for regular users, and a # for root.

tom@sanctum:~$

This format works well for most users, and it’s so common that it’s often used in tutorials to represent the user’s prompt in lieu of the single-character standard $ and #. It shows up as the basis for many of the custom prompt setups you’ll find online.

Some users may have made the modest steps of perhaps adding some brackets around the prompt, or adding the time or date:

[10:11][tom@sanctum:~]$

Still others make the prompt into a grand multi-line report of their shell’s state, or indeed their entire system, full of sound and fury and signifying way too much:

-(23:38:57)-(4 users)-(0.00, 0.02, 0.05)-
-(Linux sanctum 3.2.0-3-amd64 x86_64 GNU/Linux)-
[tom@sanctum:/dev/pts/2:/home/tom]{2}!?[MAIL]$

Then there are the BSD users and other minimalist contrarians who can’t abide anything more than a single character cluttering their screens:

Getting your prompt to work right isn’t simply a cosmetic thing, however. If done right and in a style consistent with how you work, it can provide valuable feedback on how the system is reacting to what you’re doing with it, and also provide you with visual cues that could save you a lot of confusion — or even prevent your making costly mistakes.

I’ll be working in Bash. Many of these principles work well for Zsh as well, but Zsh users might want to read Steve Losh’s article on his prompt setup first to get an idea of the syntactical differences.

Why is this important?

One of the primary differences between terminals and windowed applications is that there tends to be much less emphasis on showing metadata about the running program and its environment. For the most part, to get information about what’s going on, you need to request it with calls like pwd, whoami, readlink, env, jobs, and echo $?.

The habit of keeping metadata out of the terminal like this unless requested may appeal to a sense of minimalism, but like a lot of things in the command line world, it’s partly the olden days holding us back. When mainframes and other dinosaurs roamed the earth, terminal screens were small, and a long or complex prompt amounted to a waste of space and cycles (or even paper). In our futuristic 64-bit world, where tiny CRTs are a thing of the past and we think nothing of throwing gigabytes of RAM at a single process, this is much less of a problem.

Customising the prompt doesn’t have many “best practices” to it like a lot of things in the shell; there isn’t really a right way to do it. Some users will insist it’s valuable to have the path to the terminal device before every prompt, which I think is crazy as I almost never need that information, and when I do, I can get it with a call to tty. Others will suggest that including the working directory makes the length of the prompt too variable and distracting, whereas I would struggle to work without it. It’s worth the effort to design a prompt that reflects your working style, and includes the information that’s consistently important to you on the system.

So, don’t feel like you’re wasting time setting up your prompt to get it just right, and don’t be so readily impressed by people with gargantuan prompts in illegible rainbow colors that they copied off some no-name wiki. If you use Bash a lot, you’ll be staring at your prompt for several hours a day. You may as well spend an hour or two to make it useful, or at least easier on the eyes.

The basics

The primary Bash prompt is stored in the variable PS1. Its main function is to signal to the user that the shell is done with its latest foreground task, and is ready to accept input. PS1 takes the form of a string that can contain escape sequences for certain common prompt elements like usernames and hostnames, and which is evaluated at printing time for escape sequences, variables, and command or function calls within it.

You can inspect your current prompt definition with echo. If you’re using GNU/Linux, it will probably look similar to this:

tom@sanctum:~$ echo $PS1
\u@\h:\w\$

PS1 works like any other Bash variable; you can assign it a new value, append to it, and apply substitutions to it. To add the text bash to the start of my prompt, I could do this:

tom@sanctum:~$ PS1=bash-"$PS1"
bash-tom@sanctum:~$

There are other prompts — PS2 is used for “continued line” prompts, such as when you start writing a for loop and continue another part of it on a new line, or terminate your previous line with a backslash to denote the next line continues on from it. By default this prompt is often a right angle bracket >:

$ for f in a b c; do
>   do echo "$f"
> done

There are a couple more prompt strings which are much more rarely seen. PS3 is used by the select structure in shell scripts; PS4 is used while tracing output with set -x. Ramesh Natarajan breaks this down very well in his article on the Bash prompt. Personally, I only ever modify PS1, because I see the other prompts so rarely that the defaults work fine for me.

As PS1 is a property of interactive shells, it makes the most sense to put its definitions in $HOME/.bashrc on GNU/Linux or BSD systems. It’s likely there’s already code in there doing just that. For Mac OS X, you’ll likely need to put it into $HOME/.bash_profile instead.

Escapes

Bash will perform some substitutions for you in the first pass of its evaluation of your prompt string, replacing escape sequences with appropriate elements of information that are often useful in prompts. Below are the escape sequences as taken from the Bash man page:

\a     an ASCII bell character (07)
\d     the date in "Weekday Month Date" format (e.g., "Tue May 26")
\D{format}
       the format is passed to strftime(3) and the result is inserted into
       the prompt string; an empty format results in a locale-specific time
       representation. The braces are required
\e     an ASCII escape character (033)
\h     the hostname up to the first `.'
\H     the hostname
\j     the number of jobs currently managed by the shell
\l     the basename of the shell's terminal device name
\n     newline
\r     carriage return
\s     the name of the shell, the basename of $0 (the portion following
       the final slash)
\t     the current time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format
\T     the current time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format
\@     the current time in 12-hour am/pm format
\A     the current time in 24-hour HH:MM format
\u     the username of the current user
\v     the version of bash (e.g., 2.00)
\V     the release of bash, version + patch level (e.g., 2.00.0)
\w     the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde
       (uses the value of the PROMPT_DIRTRIM variable)
\W     the basename of the current working directory, with $HOME
       abbreviated with a tilde
\!     the history number of this command
\#     the command number of this command
\$     if the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $
\nnn   the character corresponding to the octal number nnn
\\     a backslash
\[     begin a sequence of non-printing characters, which could be used to
       embed a terminal control sequence into the prompt
\]     end a sequence of non-printing characters

As an example, the default PS1 definition on many GNU/Linux systems uses four of these codes:

\u@\h:\w\$

The \! escape sequence, which expands to the history item number of the current command, is worth a look in particular. Including this in your prompt allows you to quickly refer to other commands you may have entered in your current session by history number with a ! prefix, without having to actually consult history:

$ PS1="(\!)\$"
(6705)$ echo "test"
test
(6706)$ !6705
echo "test"
test

Keep in mind that you can refer to history commands relatively rather than by absolute number. The previous command can be referenced by using !! or !-1, and the one before that by !-2, and so on, provided that you have left the histexpand option on.

Also of particular interest are the delimiters \[ and \]. You can use these to delimit sections of “non-printing characters”, typically things like terminal control characters to do things like moving the cursor around, starting to print in another color, or changing properties of the terminal emulator such as the title of the window. Placing these non-printing characters within these delimiters prevents the terminal from assuming an actual character has been printed, and hence correctly manages things like the user deleting characters on the command line.

Colors

There are two schools of thought on the use of color in prompts, very much a matter of opinion:

Focus should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt, and using color in the prompt makes it distracting, particularly when output from some programs may also be in color.
The prompt standing out from actual program output is a good thing, and judicious use of color conveys useful information rather than being purely decorative.

If you agree more with the first opinion than the second, you can probably just skip to the next section of this article.

Printing text in color in terminals is done with escape sequences, prefixed with the \e character as above. Within one escape sequence, the foreground, background, and any styles for the characters that follow can be set.

For example, to include only your username in red text as your prompt, you might use the following PS1 definition:

PS1='\[\e[31m\]\u\[\e[0m\]'

Broken down, the opening sequence works as follows:

\[ — Open a series of non-printing characters, in this case, an escape sequence.
\e — An ASCII escape character, used to confer special meaning to the characters that follow it, normally to control the terminal rather than to enter any characters.
[31m — Defines a display attribute, corresponding to foreground red, for the text to follow; opened with a [ character and terminated with an m.
\] — Close the series of non-printing characters.

The terminating sequence is very similar, except it uses the 0 display attribute to reset the text that follows back to the terminal defaults.

The valid display attributes for 16-color terminals are:

Style
- 0 — Reset all attributes
- 1 — Bright
- 2 — Dim
- 4 — Underscore
- 5 — Blink
- 7 — Reverse
- 8 — Hidden
Foreground
- 30 — Black
- 31 — Red
- 32 — Green
- 33 — Yellow
- 34 — Blue
- 35 — Magenta
- 36 — Cyan
- 37 — White
Background
- 40 — Black
- 41 — Red
- 42 — Green
- 43 — Yellow
- 44 — Blue
- 45 — Magenta
- 46 — Cyan
- 47 — White

Note that blink may not work on a lot of terminals, often by design, as it tends to be unduly distracting. It’ll work on a linux console, though. Also keep in mind that for a lot of terminal emulators, by default “bright” colors are printed in bold.

More than one of these display attributes can be applied in one hit by separating them with semicolons. The below will give you underlined white text on a blue background, after first resetting any existing attributes:

\[\e[0;4;37;44m\]

It’s helpful to think of these awkward syntaxes in terms of opening and closing, rather like HTML tags, so that you open before and then reset after all the attributes of a section of styled text. This usually amounts to printing \[\e[0m\] after each such passage.

These sequences are annoying to read and to type, so it helps to put commonly used styles into variables:

color_red='\[\e[31m\]'
color_blue='\[\e[34m\]'
color_reset='\[\e[0m\]'

PS1=${color_red}'\u'${color_reset}'@'${color_blue}'\h'${color_reset}

A more robust method is to use the tput program to print the codes for you, and put the results into variables:

color_red=$(tput setaf 1)
color_blue=$(tput setaf 4)

This may be preferable if you use some esoteric terminal types, as it queries the terminfo or termcap databases to generate the appropriate escapes for your terminal.

The set of eight colors — or sixteen, depending on how you look at it — can be extended to 256 colors in most modern terminal emulators with a little extra setup. The escape sequences are not very different, but their range is vastly increased to accommodate the larger palette.

A useful application for prompt color can be a quick visual indication of the privileges available to the current user. The following code changes the prompt to green text for a normal user, red for root, and yellow for any other user attained via sudo:

color_root=$(tput setaf 1)
color_user=$(tput setaf 2)
color_sudo=$(tput setaf 3)
color_reset=$(tput sgr0)

if (( EUID == 0 )); then
    PS1="\\[$color_root\\]$PS1\\[$color_reset\\]"
elif [[ $SUDO_USER ]]; then
    PS1="\\[$color_sudo\\]$PS1\\[$color_reset\\]"
else
    PS1="\\[$color_user\\]$PS1\\[$color_reset\\]"
fi

Otherwise, you could simply use color to make different regions of your prompt more or less visually prominent.

Variables

Provided the promptvars option is enabled, you can reference Bash variables like $? to get the return value of the previous command in your prompt string. Some people find this valuable to show error codes in the prompt when the previous command given fails:

$ shopt -s promptvars
$ PS1='$? \$'
1 $ echo "test"
test
0 $ fail
-bash: fail: command not found
127 $

The usual environment variables like USER and HOME will work too, though it’s preferable to use the escape sequences above for those particular variables. Note that it’s important to quote the variable references as well, so that they’re evaluated at runtime, and not during the assignment itself.

Commands

If the information you want in your prompt isn’t covered by any of the escape codes, you can include the output of commands in your prompt as well, using command substitution with the syntax $(command):

$ PS1='[$(uptime) ]\$ '
[ 01:21:59 up 7 days, 13:04,  7 users, load average: 0.30, 0.40, 0.36 ]$

This requires the promptvars option to be set, the same way variables in the prompt do. Again, note that you need to use single quotes so that the command is run when the prompt is being formed, and not immediately as part of the assignment.

This can include pipes to format the data with tools like awk or cut, if you only need a certain part of the output:

$ PS1='[$(uptime | cut -d: -f5) ]\$ '
[ 0.36, 0.34, 0.34 ]$

For clarity, during prompt setup in .bashrc, it makes sense to use functions instead for reasonably complex commands:

prompt_load() {
    uptime | cut -d: -f5
}
PS1='[$(prompt_load) ]'$PS1

Note that as a normal part of command substitution, trailing newlines are stripped from the output of the command, so here the output of uptime appears on a single line.

A common usage of this pattern is showing metadata about the current directory, particularly if it happens to be a version control repository or working copy; you can use this syntax with functions to show the type of version control system, the current branch, and whether any changes require committing. Working with Git, Mercurial, and Subversion most often, I include the relevant logic as part of my prompt function.

When appended to my PS1 string, $(prompt vcs) gives me prompts that look like the following when I’m in directories running under the appropriate VCS. The exclamation marks denote that there are uncommitted changes in the repositories.

[tom@conan:~/.dotfiles](git:master!)$
[tom@conan:~/Build/tmux](svn:trunk)$
[tom@conan:~/Build/vim](hg:default!)$

In general, where this really shines is adding pieces to your prompt conditionally, to make them collapsible. Certain sections of your prompt therefore only show up if they’re relevant. This snippet, for example, prints the number of jobs running in the background of the current interactive shell in curly brackets, but only if the count is non-zero:

prompt_jobs() {
    local jobc
    while read -r _; do
        ((jobc++))
    done < <(jobs -p)
    if ((jobc > 0)); then
        printf '{%d}' "$jobc"
    fi
}

It’s important to make sure that none of what your prompt does takes too long to run; an unresponsive prompt can make your terminal sessions feel very clunky.

Note that you can also arrange to run a set of commands before the prompt is evaluated and printed, using the PROMPT_COMMAND. This tends to be a good place to put commands that don’t actually print anything, but that do need to be run before or after each command, such as operations working with history:

PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a'

Switching

If you have a very elaborate or perhaps even computationally expensive prompt, it may occasionally be necessary to turn it off to revert to a simpler one. I like to handle this by using functions, one of which sets up my usual prompt and is run by default, and another which changes the prompt to the minimal $ or # character so often used in terminal demonstrations. Something like the below works well:

prompt_on() {
    PS1="$color_prompt"'\u@\h:\w'"$(prompt_jobs)"'\$'"${color_reset}"' '
}
prompt_off() {
    PS1='\$'
}
prompt_on

You can then switch your prompt whenever you need to by typing prompt_on and prompt_off.

This can also be very useful if you want to copy text from your terminal into documentation, or into an IM or email message; it removes your distracting prompt from the text, where it would otherwise almost certainly differ from that of the user following your instructions. This is also occasionally helpful if your prompt does not work on a particular machine, or the machine is suffering a very high load average that means your prompt is too slow to load.

Bash process substitution

Posted on 2012-02-27 by Tom Ryder

For tools like diff that work with multiple files as parameters, it can be useful to work with not just files on the filesystem, but also potentially with the output of arbitrary commands. Say, for example, you wanted to compare the output of ps and ps -e with diff -u. An obvious way to do this is to write files to compare the output:

$ ps > ps.out
$ ps -e > pse.out
$ diff -u ps.out pse.out

This works just fine, but Bash provides a shortcut in the form of process substitution, allowing you to treat the standard output of commands as files. This is done with the <() and >() operators. In our case, we want to direct the standard output of two commands into place as files:

$ diff -u <(ps) <(ps -e)

This is functionally equivalent, except it’s a little tidier because it doesn’t leave files lying around. This is also very handy for elegantly comparing files across servers, using ssh:

$ diff -u .bashrc <(ssh remote cat .bashrc)

Conversely, you can also use the >() operator to direct from a filename context to the standard input of a command. This is handy for setting up in-place filters for things like logs. In the following example, I’m making a call to rsync, specifying that it should make a log of its actions in log.txt, but filter it through grep -vF .tmp first to remove anything matching the fixed string .tmp:

$ rsync -arv --log-file=>(grep -vF .tmp >log.txt) src/ host::dst/

Combined with tee this syntax is a way of simulating multiple filters for a stdout stream, transforming output from a command in as many ways as you see fit:

$ ps -ef | tee >(awk '$1=="tom"' >toms-procs.txt) \
               >(awk '$1=="root"' >roots-procs.txt) \
               >(awk '$1!="httpd"' >not-apache-procs.txt) \
               >(awk 'NR>1{print $1}' >pids-only.txt)

In general, the idea is that wherever on the command line you could specify a file to be read from or written to, you can instead use this syntax to make an implicit named pipe for the text stream.

Thanks to Reddit user Rhomboid for pointing out an incorrect assertion about this syntax necessarily abstracting mkfifo calls, which I’ve since removed.

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