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30.8. History Substitutions

Although most of the examples here use echo to demonstrate clearly just what is going on, you'll normally use history with other Unix commands.

The exclamation point (!) is the default (Section 30.15) history substitution character. This allows you to recall previously entered commands and re-execute them without retyping. To use the ! in a command line, you have several choices. Some of the following examples are more of a headache than they may be worth, but they are also used to select arguments from the command line in aliases (Section 29.3):

-- DR



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