Recent behavior changes driving me nuts [LWN.net]

Recent behavior changes driving me nuts

Posted Jul 4, 2006 7:54 UTC (Tue) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246)
Parent article: CLI Magic: Using command history in the bash shell (Linux.com)

I know there are probably more "correct" ways to do this, but this is a long standing habit. I have a tendency to open a line with a # (thereby making it a comment) and then expanding out something in my history with !.

So, for example:

#!t

might expand out into

#tail -f /var/log/messages

I then up-arrow, remove the # and edit the line to my heart's content if it was the line I'm looking for. This works great w/ older bash, such as 2.05a. Recent bash versions, such as 3.1.17, don't seem to do this.

Does anyone know a way to reenable this in bash?

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Recent behavior changes driving me nuts

Posted Jul 4, 2006 8:50 UTC (Tue) by abovett (subscriber, #13139) [Link]

If the histverify option (set with shopt) is set, you don't need to use the # trick. Any command you type using history expansion (with !) will be recalled to the prompt for checking and editing before it is executed - hit Return to execute it. In other words, if my history looks like:

540 cat SQ9285.txt
541 ls Documents/
542 history

and I type:

rm !540:1

and hit Return, then I get:

rm SQ9285.txt

with the cursor positioned at the end of the line.