Which follows the similar functionality used by the cd - command to switch to the previous directory you were in. Very handy!
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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You can do what 👀
There's more! Well, it's more a bash thing than a cd thing.. in bash the variable $_ refers to the last argument to the previous command. So you can do the following:
> mkdir -p my/nested/dir
> cd $_
> pwd
/home/user/my/nested/dir
It's handy for a whole host of things, like piping/touching then opening a file, chown then chmod, etc.
On many terminal emulators you can also use Alt-. to search through your history of previous arguments, so mkdir foo followed by cd [Alt-.] will populate your command line with cd foo for example. If you have some other command in between you can just hit Alt-. repeatedly
Or ESC followed by "." Repeating it works too.
You are an absolute king. Never again will I cp a file to a far off land, and then retype the entire path a second time to open it. Thank you!
That's incredible, I never knew that. Thank you!
This is amazing ♥️
There's also pushd and popd so that you can pushd into one directory, move around as much as you want and then go back to before the pushd with popd
… how have I not ever come across that before?!
This thread has been invaluable for me lol
Use switch, boomer!
Old habits die hard. Thanks for pointing this out. I updated the post.
Oh lol, I was just trying to poke fun, sorry if it came across as accusatory. 😎👍
Not at all. It was a funny comment (I upvoted it) 👍 But you are also right. It makes more sense to refer to switch and restore whenever possible.
What's the difference? Genuine question
Checkout was one of those commands that I joking would call Turing complete because of how much you can do with it (I haven't actually tried to see if it is, but am fully prepared for someone to be nerd sniped and tell me it actually is). I think they're mostly the same, but switch and restore were added as more straightforward versions of checkout and reset.
Well one starts with an s, the other with a c... :P
They changed the command to clarify what it does, checkout was / is used for switching branches as well as branch creation but has connotations of doing some locking in the repo from older vcs software.... I think. the new commands are switch and branch. check the docs
Idk what the deal is with switch, I thought it wasn't supposed to be creating branches but right in the docs there's a flag for it???
Im the kind of user that just deletes .git and starts over when I f up the repo, so take my git advice with a tablespoon of salt.
I switch to using switch since git switch auto-creates the local branch from the remote branch, if the branch doesn't exist yet, and a remote branch with the corresponding name exists.
Also git switch -c for auto-creating a new branch, even if there is no remote branch for it
If I remember it correctly, git checkout also automatically creates the local branch from the remote branch (of the same name), and sets up tracking.
NEVER!!
Came here to say this
Great tip!! Thanks!
But evidently git rev-parse - will not print out the previous branch 😔 that would have been useful for scripts
This led me down a real rabbit hole of looking at what you can do with git commands, very neat.
There's a few more things you can do which I found, like switching to the Nth branch you last had checked out: https://www.w3docs.com/snippets/git/how-to-checkout-the-previous-branch.html
That's so cool, this can be my favorite command so on. Switching between two branches is easy with that.
I always forget to use this one, thanks for the reminder
Note that git checkout - / git switch - examine reflog to find previous branch. Which means if you renamed the branch, at least current version of Git would be unable to run git switch -.
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