Re: subsitutions and beginning of lines.

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 10/12/2015 10:03 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Oct 12,  7:50pm, Ray Andrews wrote:
> }
> } There's a huge section "HISTORY"
> } in the man page
>
> There is?  Where?  There's "HISTORY EXPANSION" but it's all about using
> "!"-references on the command line.  There's a subsection on "History"
> in the section about options.  Where are you looking?
Yup, that's it.
>
> } but it doesn't mention that and I'll probably
> } have to eat my hat when you show me that it does.
>
> This is in "man zshbuiltins" under the "fc" command (to which the
> "history" builtin's doc directs you).
Ooops, so it does.  Still a brief summary of history specific switches 
would
be friendly.  'fc' in it's totality is a bit intimidating.

BTW Bart, the way I was trying to do it was educational so I don't 
regret it,
and I think my question is still a useful exercise: how would we do that
if there was no easy way?  Combining the words results in a 'command not
found' error,  since it seems to want to believe that 'history -10 | 
....' is one
command so I hafta leave the words unmagically joined yet the normal thing
seems to be to strip spaces down to a single one when making an array,
and that's a problem with the methods I was trying.  I don't doubt it's 
easy if you
get the incantation exactly right.  It doesn't help that all this splitting
is invisible.  As you pointed out:
> eval history -n $nnumber $sstring

... is a easy as pie so long as there's no need to massage the output,
but even if you do, I'm betting it's still only a couple of  lines. Of 
course
there's sed, but I'm banking on an internal solution.


>