Using history expansion in a bash alias or function

Question

I am trying to make a simple thing to make my teammates lives easier. They are constantly copying quote into the command line that are formatted which breaks the command ie: “test“ vs. "test"

It's proved surprisingly annoying to do with:

function damn() { !!:gs/“/" }

or:

alias damn='!!:gs/“/"'

Neither seems to work and keeps giving me either the error

-bash: !!:gs/“/" : No such file or directory

or just:

>

I must be missing something obvious here.

Answer 1

! does not work in functions or aliases. According to bash manual:

History expansion is performed immediately after a complete line is read , before the shell breaks it into words.

You can use the builtin fc command:

[STEP 100] # echo $BASH_VERSION
4.4.19(1)-release
[STEP 101] # alias damn='fc -s “=\" ”=\" '
[STEP 102] # echo “test”
“test”
[STEP 103] # damn
echo "test"
test
[STEP 104] #

---

For quick referecne, the following is output of help fc .

fc: fc [-e ename] [-lnr] [first] [last] or fc -s [OLD=NEW] [command]
    Display or execute commands from the history list.

    fc is used to list or edit and re-execute commands from the history list.
    FIRST and LAST can be numbers specifying the range, or FIRST can be a
    string, which means the most recent command beginning with that
    string.

    Options:
      -e ENAME  select which editor to use.  Default is FCEDIT, then EDITOR,
                then vi
      -l        list lines instead of editing
      -n        omit line numbers when listing
      -r        reverse the order of the lines (newest listed first)

|   With the `fc -s [OLD=NEW ...] [command]' format, COMMAND is
|   re-executed after the substitution OLD=NEW is performed.

    A useful alias to use with this is r='fc -s', so that typing `r cc'
    runs the last command beginning with `cc' and typing `r' re-executes
    the last command.

    Exit Status:
    Returns success or status of executed command; non-zero if an error occurs.

Answer 2

Here is a slightly more general solution using a bash function to wrap the fc call, if you want to do something to the string beyond substitution.

function damn() {
    # Capture the previous command.
    cmd=$(fc -ln -1)

    # Do whatever you want with cmd here
    cmd=$(echo $cmd | sed 's/[“”]/"/g')

    # Re-run the command
    eval $cmd
}