quora appears broken at the moment . . . I was going to suggest: in many shells (bash, tcsh, etc), !foo will execute the most recent command from your history

quora appears broken at the moment . . . I was going to suggest: in many shells (bash, tcsh, etc), !foo will execute the most recent command from your history that matches foo, for example: > grep -lots -of -options /complicated_regex/ ./some/path/* | /pipe/filter # realize you are in the wrong directory > cd /the/right/directory > !g and similarly, !! is the most recent command, which comes in handy for "sudo !!"[1] [1] http://xkcd.com/149/ http://xkcd.com/149/