I’m posting this because I’m tired of forgetting and having to ask this over and over again in IRC. Hopefully it will also help someone else speed up their work flow.

Many people are familiar with the special $_ parameter that is set to the last argument of the previous command. It makes things like the following a little quicker:

$ echo "foo" > foo
$ mv foo bar
$ cat $_
foo

I have always stumbled, however, in this case:

$ echo "foo" > bar
$ cat $_
cat: foo: No such file or directory

The solution is to use the !$ history expansion rather than the $_ parameter.

$ echo "foo" > bar
$ cat !$
cat bar
bar