bash history

[Andrew Malcolmson]

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
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