this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Programmer Humor

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submitted 4 days ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The one people see me doing that gets a "huh?" Is:

~$ !find
find -type f -name '*blah*' -print0 | xargs -0 gzip
~$

"Wait! What did you do?" "Oh. Do you not know about bang?"

[–] UpperBroccoli@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I love the excitement of using !?

Did I remember correctly what command sequence I last used that pattern with? Will my data be gone? Will I send a vulgar email to my boss? Who knows, let's find out!

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 1 points 4 days ago

That's why you can add ":p" to the end just to print it.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I don't understand people who have the confidence to just blindly run the last matching command like that. Like, are you 100% sure that the last time you ran find was that one, not the one that piped to xargs rm?

At least with zsh you can tab to complete the !find and verify it's what you want before running it. And, AFAIK by default, the shell option hist_verify is set, so if you do just type !find and hit enter, it doesn't run the command, it loads the command into the editing buffer so you can look it over first. Maybe I just have a weak memory, but I really appreciate the footgun prevention. At worst I have to hit enter twice. At best, I save myself a lot of grief.

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 1 points 4 days ago

Normally the use case is

  • Constructed a long command, but it didn't work for some reason.
  • I go fix the reason it didn't work
  • I do the first thing again

It's in my recent memory, but maybe there's been 10 or so commands of me fixing stuff in-between.