Re: append to history entry?

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 27/12/16 11:09 AM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> Neither, really.  It's a case of gradually accumulating requirements
> on what shells do, rather than any flaw in the original design.
Well, the flaw is just that the additional stuff wasn't anticipated.  
Mind, foretelling the future
can be difficult.

> Seriously, you can't ask for a way to muck with something that is
> normally handled transparently by the shell internals and then gripe
> about having to replicate some of that hidden processing.  Well, you
> can, but it doesn't really help. :-)
Yeah, the chaffing is just because however useful some of that is in 
most situations,
it would be nice to be able to occasionally have a string be just a 
string be just a string
in a C sort of way.  Plain vanilla a literal.  Like my old gripe about a 
command not being
able to know the literal keystrokes that called it *except* that it's 
perfectly literal in history
*except* that if commands are chained with semicolons one can't just 
grab it back from
history for the obvious reason that any given command doesn't know where 
it is in a string
of chained commands -- one would think that one should be able to 
intercept the string
before all the expansions.  So I hafta do all this 'noglob'.  Most of my 
irritations with zsh
are in trying to *stop* it from doing things on occasion.
>
> Daniel is rather dogmatic about handling edge cases that I tend to
> ignore for the sake of not throwing out all the details that make you
> "take it on faith" (a phrase that makes ME grind my teeth whenever you
> write it).
Well, I trust you guys and until I see the logic, I'm just going to take 
your words for it.
There is so much to know.

>
> } One thing tho Bart, it seems it should be 'echo' because when the
> } command line is recalled and executed, the colon throws an error
>
> It shouldn't.  There's no difference between "echo" and ":" except
> that ":" discards its arguments without printing them.  If you're
> getting an error on ":" you've done something else to cause it.
>
> What error?
>
Ah ... seems there must be a space after the colon:


     print -rS -- "rap ${${(q+)@}}; : ${(q-)HOST}"

... that works fine, and doesn't bother with the echo, so it seems to be 
exactly the sort of
thing I'm looking for as to writing to history.  So much to love, 
frustrations or no.