Quick Tip Invoke-History

The more time I spend living in the CLI the more I appreciate learning and adopting shorthand for operations. In Powershell the aliases for Where-Object and ForEach-Object have become second nature. Using up arrow to repeat the previous command and add more to it a near constant occurence. One situation I find myself in quite a bit however is running a command in Powershell, and then finding that based on the output I’d actually like to re-run that command an get the value from a property instead. On the keyboard I’ve been using for the past couple of years I would typically just hit up-arrow to repeat the last command, Home to put my cursor on the beginning of the line, type a ( then End a closing ) then use dot notation to call the property I wanted the value of.

As an example let’s say I run a script and see what the output looks like:
From this I observe the output and decide that I’d like to add some parameters. No problem, I’ll just up-arrow to repeat the command and add the parameters to the end:

Great, but if I wanted to call a property/method on that output object I’d either have to pipe it to another cmdlet or wrap it in parenthesis and then call the property I want with the dot shortcut. I.e.:

Seems simple enough. Home key, parenthesis, End key, parenthesis, dot, property name. But, my new keyboard is a 60% and doesn’t have dedicated arrow keys requiring that I hold another key to access a layer that has arrow keys on it.

Invoke-History Has Entered the Chat

I remebered that along with Get-History there was Invoke-History and its alias of ‘r’. I’ve previously used this similarly to repeating commands in bash. Get-History, find the number of the command, then use r <num> to repeat:

Through experimentation I found that calling r by itself repeats the previous command by default.

The next thing I tried was wrapping ‘r’ in an expression to see if I could then use the dot shortcut to retrieve a property or method:

And shazam! Now instead of needing arrow keys or Home/End keys I can start from a fresh prompt and type (r) following by whatever it was I wanted to do on the previous operation.

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