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cat foo | less

Normally I'd typed something like "grep -i 'something' foo | less", and wanted to just up arrow the previous line and change the grep stuff to cat. I don't know why, it doesn't really save me anything. Maybe it's the hackerish "because I can, that's why" instinct at work.



`cat foo | less` is gratuitous. `less foo` is all you need.


It'll save you a few more keystrokes if you do

    cat !$ | less
!$ is "the last argument to the previous command".


If you do

    less <ESC>.
it will save you even more keystrokes.


Do you remap ESC to another key?


No, but for me <ESC> acts like <META> and the actual keybinding is M-. or M-_.

The command you are looking for is yank-last-arg for bash and insert-last-word for zsh.


You have that backwards--Meta actually means "prepend Escape" (or 8th bit on, but that's another discussion).




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