fish: sudo: !!: command not found

Question

I have fish installed in my Linux Mint DE. I really like how fish makes things easier and it looks so pretty although I haven't find a correct answer about why I can't execute:

sudo: !!: command not found

At first I tried to escape the exclamation signs with sudo !! but didn't work either. Does someone know why is this failing?

Solution 1

I haven't found a inbuilt replacement for !! in Fish however you can write a function that allows you to keep using !!

Taken from this answer https://superuser.com/a/719538/226822

function sudo --description "Replacement for Bash 'sudo !!' command to run last command using sudo."
    if test "$argv" = !!
    eval command sudo $history[1]
else
    command sudo $argv
    end
end

Solution 2

The !! syntax is part of the bash history substitution feature, which fish does not implement. See this link for a discussion. Please feel free to weigh in there on what you think fish ought to do.

The most efficient (in terms of keypresses) replacement for sudo !! is up-arrow to recall the last history item, ctrl-A to move to the beginning of the line, then type sudo.

Solution 3

@ridiculous_fish's answer is outdated. The quickest way to achieve the equivalent to sudo !! would be Ctrl + p/up-arrow (whichever you prefer), and then Alt+s to prefix the command with sudo.

Solution 4

If you use !! only in the context of sudo !!, you can define a keybinding to ^s (CTRL+s) which prepends sudo to your command:

function prepend_command
  set -l prepend $argv[1]
  if test -z "$prepend"
    echo "prepend_command needs one argument."
    return 1
  end

  set -l cmd (commandline)
  if test -z "$cmd"
    commandline -r $history[1]
  end

  set -l old_cursor (commandline -C)
  commandline -C 0
  commandline -i "$prepend "
  commandline -C (math $old_cursor + (echo $prepend | wc -c))
end

This allows to type in any command and prepend sudo while typing or like in your case as a substitution of sudo !!

See the Ahti's comment on the github discussion

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Comments

[Angel Todorov]

See also superuser.com/q/719531/4714

[VaTo]

Ok thanks for the clarification. Although, in order to run sudo with the last command by going through the history and then ctrl+A is not exclusively from fish, that's basically how bash works.

[casey]

@SaulOrtega he didn't claim it was exclusively from fish, just that that method will work in fish, while !! will not.

[Nathaniel]

You have two options .config/fish/config.fish or if you want to keep things separate put them in individual files under .config/fish/functions/newfunction1.fish newfunction2.fish etc

[ossbuntu]

Or even better, use Ctrl+P to get the previous command and then Ctrl+A to go to the beginning of the line. To go all-in, use Ctrl/Alt + B (Backward) along with Ctrl/Alt + F (Forward) to replace the arrow keys entirely, Ctrl+E to replace Home and Ctrl+H along with Ctrl+W to replace Backspace. These shortcuts work in all shells and in vim's insert mode as well.

[frederickjh]

@vato In this can you would save the code above to ~/.config/fish/functions/sudo.fish The name of the file should match the function inside.

[rien333]

No idea why this has been downvoted, but there is now an even quicker way to emulate sudo !! , namely by simply pressing Alt + s, which will get the last command from your history and prefix it with sudo.