Terminal bang (!) not Working as Expected

Ask Fedora
1

From what I remember the “!” command in bash is to re-execute a command.

One way of doing this is to run the command history, then running the appropriate entry, !2028 to repeat command 2,028 for example.

What I used to do much more commonly was “repeat last command starting with …” to just repeat the last thing I ran. For example !vi would re-run the last command starting with vi.

I just tried this, and it did not work as expected. It ran a different command, not the last one. Has something changed? Is this expected behaviour, or a bug? Why did it run a different command instead of the last one?

Terminal Output:

($) /mnt/Storage/win10-share: vi ~/.mountShares.sh
($) /mnt/Storage/win10-share: !vi
vi .moveApps.sh
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2

I also remember !cmd should run the last as well.

Just done a quick test:
$ echo 1xx
→ 1xx
$ echo 2xx
→ 2xx
$echo 3xx
→ 3xx
$!echo
→ 3xx

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3

Seems to work fine here. Have you checked the entries in the history to see what the latest entries are? Did you run commands in another bash session in parallel?

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4

What will happen when there are multiple terminals running in parallel?

5

Interesting. I do have multiple terminals running, but I’m not running the same commands on different terminals. I haven’t edited that .moveApps.sh file today, so I don’t know why it would open that one.

6

!! runs the last command. I often use sudo !! in the case I’ve forgotten to run the command as root.

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7

A quick web search give me this, and lots of other posts:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/80371/bash-history-handling-with-multiple-terminals

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