I want to control and use command line history better

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

Helpful

Up

0

::

Anonymous wrote:

Is the

super + r

aka the windows key being used for other anything?

I’m not sure but you are right in your thoughts.

As far as I know only a couple of Ctrl and Esc mappings are used so this key binding is worth trying.

--
Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

Helpful

Up

0

::

Notice that this thread is now in the Tips and Tricks section as recommended.

I looked at the other tool with the fuzzy searching that can be used with Vim-style methods. For those who want to search for their shell history for a particular pattern this might be handy, but even like hstr, both searching and selecting particular items can actually be managed with the standard history because both Emacs and Vi-style Bash search capabilities are plenty powerful in their own right. Not only that, if you set your history size large enough, you can find commands that you typed that go as far back as your history simply by typing in the history command from a shell prompt. You can, if you want, write that to a file if it is helpful, (though it really isn’t necessary).

I’d say for the sake of BobC, hstr is the right command for additional convenience, and mapping the bash hstr command to something like F5 or Super + R is an appropriate solution to achieve what BobC is searching for.

Now the only remaining thing to discuss is whether you know how to create a key mapping and put it in your Bash resource file (which is .bashrc). IF this is known and clear, we are done; otherwise feel free to either ASK or POST your recommended Bash (.bashrc) key binding for the command hstr.

--
Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

Helpful

Up

0

::

Here are a few resources for creating your own Bash key bindings:

https://www.computerhope.com/unix/bash/bind.htm
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4200800/in-bash-how-do-i-bind-a-function-key-to-a-command
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/89622/how-to-execute-a-script-in-shell-when-a-shortcut-key-is-pressed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzIqCeGHRpM

bind -p
will show the bindings of every key sequence, including the ones that have already been assigned, so that is helpful for determining which key sequences may be available for your personal use.

I hope that these answer any remaining questions; if not, please ask a specific question and explain the scenario you are interested in.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by Brian Masinick.

--
Brian Masinick

[Moderator BobC]

Helpful

Up

0

::

I am thinking that this hotkey belongs in the bash setup, and my solution is to add an alias hs to run hstr.

[Moderator BobC]

Helpful

Up

0

::

I finally figured out how to program Alt-r, not sure which is better…

bind '"ò":"hstr\n"'

Odd, it worked to echo foobar, but after that never worked again. My give up. I guess I’ll type hs and press enter. It’s not perfect, but it might be me or how I’m trying to use it…

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by BobC.

[Anonymous]

Helpful

Up

0

::

re: the topic title “I want to control and use command line history better”, here a a couple tips:

We can add breadcrumb notes-to-self into the history list.
Prepend a “:” colon at beginning of line then type whatever and press enter.
The shell interpreter will treat the line as a “no-op”, yet the will be inserted into history.

We can avoid commandstrings containing sensitive (passwords, etc) info being stored to history
by prepending one or more spaces at beginning-of-line.

^— these work for me, using bash.
I haven’t checked whether they are universally effective across various shells.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

Helpful

Up

0

::

I got a bit different result:
On one hand, a line with : at the beginning WILL be in the command history, but if I write:
: This is a comment
(does appear in history but issues a command syntax error)

I get a syntax error, though it DOES show up in the command history.
However, if I write:
# This is a comment,
it *literally* IS interpreted as a comment.
(and appears in command history)

However, if I put a space or two in front of a colon (:) them it is ALSO interpreted as a comment, and shows up in history.

For example,
: two spaces, then colon is interpreted as a comment
If you add parentheses, these want to be interpreted, so it doesn’t work with :
You CAN use parentheses IF you use # as the comment indicator at the beginning of the line.
!# is NOT a comment; this tells the shell – at least as the first line, to interpret the next argument

I found THIS in the BASH man page regarding the use of comments:

COMMENTS
In a non-interactive shell, or an interactive shell in which the
interactive_comments option to the shopt builtin is enabled (see
SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS below), a word beginning with # causes
that word and all remaining characters on that line to be
ignored. An interactive shell without the interactive_comments
option enabled does not allow comments. The interactive_comments
option is on by default in interactive shells.

SHELLOPTS
A colon-separated list of enabled shell options. Each
word in the list is a valid argument for the -o option to
the set builtin command (see SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS
below). The options appearing in SHELLOPTS are those
reported as on by set -o. If this variable is in the
environment when bash starts up, each shell option in the
list will be enabled before reading any startup files.
This variable is read-only.

[-+]O [shopt_option]
shopt_option is one of the shell options accepted by the
shopt builtin (see SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS below). If
shopt_option is present, -O sets the value of that option; +O
unsets it. If shopt_option is not supplied, the names and
values of the shell options accepted by shopt are printed on
of the extdebug option to the shopt builtin below).

shopt [-pqsu] [-o] [optname …]
If either -s or -u is used with no optname arguments, shopt
Unless otherwise noted, the shopt options are disabled (unset)

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by Brian Masinick.

--
Brian Masinick

[Author]

Posts