Extracting Data with Modifiers

The :h modifier

History expansion supports modifiers, which are suffixes we add to the command. For example, we saw that adding :p to a history expansion prints the result of the change but doesn’t execute the altered command. But other modifiers let us alter the path of the results.

Here’s a trivial example to see how this works. We use the ls command to list the dpkg.log file:

ls /var/log/dpkg.log

Next, we use echo to print out the previous command’s first argument, but we then use the :h modifier, which will extract the path up to the last segment:

echo !^:h

Use the terminal below to practice these commands.