Efficiently editing commands with zsh

Question

Let's say I use CTRL-R and then type tail to find the last time I ran tail.

What comes up is tail -F /path/to/log/file-2011-03-07.log

The command I want to run is the above command, but with 2011-03-08 instead of 2011-03-07. Is there a way to do replace with a regexp via the command line?

Answer 1

r 7=8 tail should do it. Read up on fc and r; they're not very widely known but very useful for this kind of thing.

There isn't regexp editing directly, but if you use fc directly you may be able to play with fc -e a bit. (Indeed, fc -e 'sed -ie s/foo/bar/' command appears to work. You might be able to wrap that in a function.) There's also -m to use a shell glob to select the command from history.