On 18 Aug 2003 00:37:13 -0400, "Tim Writer" <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> said:

Lloyd D Budd <lloyd-fEEwcc3XMu8jODpR/OX0VQ at public.gmane.org> writes:

...

Hi,

...

From time to time I wonder how 'history' works, and what is the mechanism for the many bash sessions making it into '.bash_history'?

Today, I was reminded of my previous wondering as 'history' corrupted my session's display -- 'reset' resolved.

I find the most useful history related command to be: [Ctrl]+r :: reverse incremental search

I just now found HISTIGNORE.

I am aware of bash-completion. It seems that one could do a lot more with this thinking. Any smart history search/modification tools out there?

The Z shell (zsh) is much better at this sort of stuff than bash.

True. Zsh is the ultimate interactive shell. It's SHARE_HISTORY option does the session history merging you're asking about. In bash, '!' starts a history expansion: '!!' recalls the last command line, '!$' recalls the final argument of the last command line, and ^foo^bar substitutes bar for foo in the previous line. See the bash man page for more like this. But Zsh does these and more: pressing TAB after entering one of these sequences does the history expansion in the current line. Adding a :h causes only the 'head' of a path (everything up to the final '/') to be substituted, :t the 'tail' (filename), and :r the filename with any suffix removed, e.g. %~>less /usr/share/doc/thing/README %~>cd !$:h %/usr/share/doc/thing> Since you asked about completion, zsh has special command-specific completion features like: cd <TAB> ==> lists directories tar xzvf <TAB> ==> lists only files ending in .gz or .tgz ls -<TAB> ==> a list of all possible argument to ls dpkg -L <TAB> ==> a list of installed debian packages scp localfile me-Ja3L+HSX0kI at public.gmane.org:<TAB> ==> Very cool: does remote path completion!! More info: Linux Magazine Articles (see columns for May, June, July 2002) http://www.linux-mag.com/depts/power.html Other cool things in bash and zsh http://www.jpeek.com/talks/ukuug_20000720/ Adam's Zsh & Shell pages http://adamspiers.org/computing/zsh/ Zsh Fan Page http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/zsh.html IBM Developer Works article. http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-z.html?open&l=335,t=gr,p=Z-Shell Zsh User Guide (most comprehensive info) http://zsh.sunsite.dk/Guide/zshguide.html ------------------- Andrew Malcolmson -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml