From time to time, it can be quite cumbersome to fix a mistyped command in your shell. What if you could fix the command you just typed in your favourite editor? Well, that’s exactly what fc command is all about, and it is standard to all Unix system (this includes GNU/Linux & macOS). Let see how that work.

From Wikipedia:

fc is a standard program on Unix that lists, edits and reexecutes commands previously entered to an interactive shell.

Using fc looks something like this:

1. You type a non-working/wrong command
2. You type fc
3. The last typed command (before fc) is open in your editor
4. You fix the command, save, and quit
5. When you exit the editor, the edited command is executed

Here is an interactive example in which I use the wrong path and fix it via fc:

Of course this example is a little bit contrived because you should use autocompletion to navigate folders and not type your path entirely.

Checking my history, I have found this big command (which check if Homebrew’s ZSH path is part of the /etc/shells file):

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export zshpath="$(brew --prefix)/bin/zsh"; \
grep -q "^${zshpath}" /ec/shells || \
sudo -E sh -c "echo '$zshpath' >> /etc/shells"

It is not obvious, but there is a mistake right in the middle: /ec/shells instead of /etc/shells. With fc fixing this is really easy to fix since I will have access to my whole editor and not only my shell movement and shortcut.

But that’s not all fc can also take an argument to fix an arbitrary command from your shell history, not only the last one.

Use fc -l to list your history

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$ fc -l
 6213  rm -rf test
 6214  brew install asciinema
 6215  vim ~/bin/mac-bootstrap
 6216  exit
 6221  ls
 6222  mkdir right-path
 6228  asciinema rec
 6229  cd wrong-path
 6230  fc
 6231  cd right-path
 6232  pwd

Then you can use fc <history number> to fix a specific command:

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$ fc 6214
# Will open “brew install asciinema” in your editor

There is not much more to this tool, but you can find the full documentation of fc here if want to check out the other arguments.