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Comment by lopsidedBrain | Hacker News Reader

My trick has always been to rely on tab auto-completion.

    mv foo-<tab>
    mv foo-bar-baz foo-<tab>
    mv foo-bar-baz foo-bar-baz

Now I can edit the second part pretty quickly.

Downside: you have to at least type `foo-` twice.

Upside: command line history still has the full command.

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Tab-completion is somewhat obnoxious in directories with lots of files sharing a common prefix, for example.

Also, if you accidentally tab-complete the same file for output and input, depending on how clever the program is, you may end up deleting the source file.

i always run mv -i to make sure i don't accidentally overwrite an existing file.

i don't alias mv to mv -i either, to avoid getting used to the idea that just mv is going to ask me, because i might work on a server where the alias is not set.

I double check the filenames instead, because many of the tools I work with don't have -i flags.

I’ve done

  gcc foo.c -o foo.c

far too many times :(

Seems like gcc should be smart enough to reject that mistake nowadays, right?!

I should write a shell frontend to gcc to warn if I do this…

I work in exactly two modes of `gcc` usage. I either accept `./a.out` as the name I deserve, or I write a `CMakeLists.txt`.

There nothing in between.

In ZSH I do:

mv foo-bar <alt>-m

It’ll repeat foo-bar. It’s very useful. I miss it when I’m using Fish or Bash.

In bash, you can do ctrl-w ctrl-y ctrl-y to cut paste paste as long as it doesnt have spaces

I do this too, but sometimes its just too many tabs

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