Question

I want to be able to get the argument portion of the previous command. $^ seems to return just the command and not the args. Get-History -count 1 returns the last full command including the command and the args. I could just .Replace the first instance, but I am not sure if it is correct.

Scenario is that sometimes I want to do something like this. Let’s assume that $* are the args to the last command:

dir \\share\files\myfile.exe
copy $* c:\windows\system32

Any ideas how to get the last args correctly?

UPDATE: finished my method for doing this.

function Get-LastArgs
{
    $lastHistory = (Get-History -count 1)
    $lastCommand = $lastHistory.CommandLine   
    $errors = [System.Management.Automation.PSParseError[]] @()

    [System.Management.Automation.PsParser]::Tokenize($lastCommand, [ref] $errors) | ? {$_.type -eq "commandargument"} | select -last 1 -expand content    
 }

Now I can just do:

dir \\share\files\myfile.exe
copy (Get-LastArgs) c:\windows\system32

To reduce typing, I did

set-alias $* Get-LastArgs

so now I still have to do

copy ($*) c:\windows\system32

if anybody has any ideas for making this better please let me know.

Answer 1

There is no easy way to get the last args in this fashion without parsing the history item itself, and this is no trivial matter. The reason is that the “last arguments” may not be what you think they are after you take splatting, pipelines, nested subexpressions, named and unnammed arguments/parameters into the equasion. In powershell v2 there is a parser available for tokenizing commands and expressions, but I’m not sure you want to go that route.

ps> $psparser::Tokenize("dir foo", [ref]$null) | ? {
    $_.type -eq "commandargument" } | select -last 1 -expand content
foo