A trick to run shell examples with a leading $

Remy Sharp shared a beautiful shell trick that he found in Mikkel Malmberg's dotfiles. You probably know the inconvenience (it's not a big problem in my opinion); you read some documentation and find a shell command you have to run. Unfortunately, it includes a leading $ symbol. Now, you have to carefully copy the line to exclude the $ because your shell won't understand the $.

What if your shell would be able to deal with a leading $ in your pasted commands? Here's the solution.

Add a $ file to your $PATH that includes the following and you're done! 🎉

#!/bin/zsh
exec "$@"

All the $ command does is running the rest of the passed command arguments. That's beautiful!

Thanks Remy and Mikkel!