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Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

GStreamer uses the argument "!" as a pseudo-"|" so you can build multimedia pipelines without actually using Unix pipelines, or repeating the gst-launch command:

https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/tutorials/ba...

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Having written a large number of CLIs in the past, I've often come across this issue but never had a good solution. This is remarkably simple, elegant, and easily generalized into a CLI framework so it can be implemented with ease. Thank you for sharing this nugget of gold!

Sadly Zsh uses ! for history expansion so they'd all have to be escaped in that shell.

Even in the middle of a line, not just at the start?

Yes, and it's a great feature IMO:

    touch projects/new-lib/readme
    cd !!:1:h

That would be great.

  pastel random ! mix red ! lighten 0.2 ! format hex

I made a wrapper to support this: https://gist.github.com/ayosec/816ccba7a75aba5336db0fe0b9791...

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