Fix Shell Commands Using fc

Things under legendu.net/outdated are outdated technologies that the author does not plan to update any more. Please look for better alternatives.

Fish Shell is preferred to Bash/Zsh. The following content is for Bash/Zsh only.

fzf.history is a better alternative to fc’s core functionality (edit and re-execute command).

Tips & Traps¶

In Linux shells like Bash and Zsh, fc is a built-in command that stands for “Fix Command”. Its primary purpose is to let you edit and re-execute commands from your history using $EDITOR.
fc -l 1 might throw the error -bash: fc: history specification out of range in bash (some people say that this won’t be an issue in zsh as zsh is smart enough to handle specification out of range but I haven’t verified it yet) if the (absolute) first bash history command has been pruned (due to large number of history commands). HISTTIMEFORMAT="" history | sed -E 's/^[ ]*[0-9]+[ ]*//' is a more robust command for the same purpose.

Command	Action
`fc`	Edit the last shell command using `$EDITOR` and send it for execution.
`fc 123`	Edit and execute command number 123 from history.
`fc git`	Edit and execute the last command starting with "git".
`fc -l`	List all history commands.
`fc -ln`	List all history commands without numbers.
`fc -ln 100 110`	List commands from 100 to 110 without numbers.
`fc -ln -5`	List the last 5 historical commands without numbers.
`fc -s`	Re-execute the last command without editing.
`fc -s old=new`	Re-execute the last command, replacing `old` with `new`.
`fc -s old=new git`	Re-execute the last `git` command, replacing `old` with `new`.