That's technically incorrect. !$ is a shortcut for !!:$, which is the last word of the previous command in history. A filename is treated as a single word, as y

That's technically incorrect. !$ is a shortcut for !!:$, which is the last word of the previous command in history. A filename is treated as a single word, as you say. This is however distinct from the last argument, which is accessible with $_ . As an example: $ echo 'example' > file.txt Here !$ would return the filename, and $_ would return 'example', which was the last argument to echo.