What is the shorthand for the first argument of the previous comment in bash? last is '$!'

Question

What is the special character which indicate first ?

if we do

$ vi .bashrc
$ source !$

this !$ will replaced by .bashrc because ! means previous line(am I correct?), $ means last word (for sure)

then what is first?

I want to insert some string in every line in vi editor using :%s/find-key-word/replaced-keyword/g

in here, if I put :%s/$/example/g in vi editor, it will append in all lines with example.

I want to insert all in front of all string every line.

I know I can use visual block (ctrl+v) and select all front lines and insert (shift+i) insert some word and escape(esc) will do the same... but I want to do in one shot..

please let me know how to do..

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

There are two questions, so you are getting two kinds of answers :)

The bash command history has only a passing similarity to the vi regular expression syntax.

^ is the beginning of line in vi. $ is the end of line in vi.

!!:0 is one way of accessing the first word of the previous command in bash

!$ is one way of accessing the last word of the previous command in bash

Answer 2

To indicate beginning of line, the symbol used is:

^

See an example:

$ cat a
hello!
this is me
testing some
stuff
$ sed 's/^/XXX/' a
XXXhello!
XXXthis is me
XXXtesting some
XXXstuff

Answer 3

The character you are looking for is ^.

For example, :%s/^/example/g will prepend all lines with the string example.

In bash, !^ refers to the first argument of the previous command, and !$ the last argument.