How to copy last command in bash

Often I find myself trying out a command in the shell in a few different ways. Then when I finally get it right, I want to copy what I ran, sometimes to share it with someone or often just to jot it down in my notes.

Sometimes that's not as easy as I would want. That might be because the command printed a lot of things to the screen, so the command is far away or even lost. Other times it's just because it's just because I don't want to use the mouse.

I wrote a little bash function to copy the last command to the clipboard. Note that this is only tested on OSX, so it might not work on other operating systems, particularly if the don't have pbcopy built in.

function copy-last {
    history | tail -n 1 | awk '{$1=""; print $0}' | pbcopy
}

This command has four parts, the output of each is piped into the next as input:

history list all commands in the history.

tail -n 1 returns the last line of the input it receives.

awk '{$1=""; print $0}' is the tricky part of this function. The output of history returns is many lines of two columns each. The first is an id, and the second is a command. Here awk ignores the first column and prints whatever is left over. At least that is my understanding, the original article is here.

pbcopy takes whatever was passed as its input and copies it to the system clipboard.

Bash has a few other shorthands that I know of to get the last command. The ones I know are !?, !!, and !-1. I suspect that if you somehow put those inside of an echo command, you could then pipe the result into pbcopy. I wasn't able to get something like that working though, and this does the trick 😅 Feel free to let me know if you find a solution though!