Fish shell: variable with last argument

Question

What is a fish shell equivalent of mkdir -p foo/bar/baz/quux && cd $_?

I know about $history[1], but here I need only last argument of the previous command.

Answer 1

As suggested in another thread Alt+. cycles arguments from previous commands at cursor input:

mkdir -p ~/fish/previous/arg/demo
cd 
#  ^ hit Alt + .
cd ~/fish/previous/arg/demo

Answer 2

fish doesn't support a last argument variable unfortunately.

An efficient interactive way to do this is to make the directory:

> mkdir -p foo/bar/baz/quux

Then type cd and the first character of the path.

> cd f

At this point fish will probably autosuggest the whole path. If not you can press alt-up to do a history token search and it will certainly find it.

A scripting way to do it would be:

set path foo/bar/baz/quux && mkdir -p $path && cd $path

Answer 3

Fish has no shortcut for this, you'll have to repeat that argument.

Or if it's for interactive use, press alt-up to cycle through older arguments.

Answer 4

I also found the lack of $_ annoying. A (somewhat hacky) solution is to create a function like this:

function cdl
    echo "$history[1]" | read --array --tokenize result
    cd "$result[-1]"
end

So now you can type cdl instead of cd $_ to change to the directory you just created.

EDIT: Added correct quoting and --tokenize which was added in this PR in version 3.1. Now it works correctly with directory names that contain spaces.