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Comment by Syssiphus | Hacker News Reader

Pressing ESC and then _ will insert the last argument of the last line. Repeat to go up in the history.

If you go through the command history and press CTRL-o on a line it will be executed and the command on the commandline will be replaced by the next line in the history.

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Also M-. (meta-period). Keep banging on M-. to pull in the last argument of preceding commands.

With a numeric prefix argument N, it grabs the Nth-from-the-end argument of the previous command, so M-3 M-. grabs the 3rd-from-last argument from the previous command.

In Bash, you also can use the $_ variable which is the last argument of the previous command:

  $ stat /tmp/foobar
    File: `/tmp/foobar'
    Size: 0         	Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096
    ...
  
  $ rm -v $_
  removed `/tmp/foobar'

You can also use `!$`.

!$ runs the last command. it's bad if the last command is of the form command arg... because it'd run command without every other argument passed in the command line

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