The Last Argument

Now this is firmly in the realms of "I Did Not Know That" ....

Whilst tinkering with a private Docker Registry, I was reading this tutorial from Digital Ocean: -

How To Set Up a Private Docker Registry on Ubuntu 18.04


On the server you have created to host your private Docker Registry, you can create a docker-registry directory, move into it, and then create a data subfolder with the following commands:

    mkdir ~/docker-registry && cd $_

    mkdir data

The thing that perked my interest was the use of $_

I realised that this was somehow magically changing into the newly created ~/docker-registry subdirectory .....

How did this work ?

The internet had the answer ...

what does 'cd $_' mean?

$_ expands to the last argument to the previous simple command* or to previous command if it had no arguments.

mkdir my-new-project && cd $_

^ Here you have a command made of two simple commands. The last argument to the first one is my-new-project so $_ in the second simple command will expand to my-new-project. 


In other words, the magic argument $_ means "Take the argument from the previous command i.e. my-new-project and run the cd command against it.

So, to take the first example further, I could've done this: -

mkdir -p ~/docker-registry/data && cd $_

which would: -

(a) create the entire path - ~/docker-registry/data

(b) change into it

which can be validated: -

pwd

/Users/hayd/docker-registry/data

Amazing !