What the . . . oh, I had *history* aliased for some reason, to *history -t
%FT%T 0*. Convenient when I type it by itself, but too late for *-m* by the
end of it; I so rarely use the command that I didn't notice I'd restricted
myself that way. Sorry for the added confusion.

(I replaced it with a function that only adds those arguments if I didn't
supply any already.)

I still think from Ray's mention of "words" that he was reading
documentation about history expansion rather than pattern-matching.

So, OK, *-m* option restricts the list of history entries printed out to
those matching the pattern. The argument is a glob pattern of the sort used
to match files, not a regular expression. Even if it were a regular
expression, though, *^ * and *$* would still match everything, since every
string has a beginning and an end. So I'm not clear what your goal was.

If you have *extendedglob* turned on, then *^ *is negation; *^foo* matches
anything that doesn't match *foo*, so *^* again matches everything. If you
don't have *extendedglob* turned on, it's not special at all, and *^* looks
for an entry exactly equal to nothing but "*^*".  And *$* is not special
either way, so that is again looking for an entry consisting of nothing but
a single dollar sign, and not surprisingly failing to find one.



On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 4:21 PM Lawrence Velázquez <larryv@zsh.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 4, 2024, at 3:49 PM, Ray Andrews wrote:
> > On 2024-06-04 11:12, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> >> What's "history -m"? Doesn't that just look for items in the history
> >> containing "-m"?
> > The Devil!  Had that in my function for years, thought it meant 'pattern
> > following'.  Nuts, it works:
> >
> > 5 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 1 % history -rn "grep*" 1
> > fc: event not found: grep*
> >
> > 5 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 1 % history -rnm "grep*" 1
> > grep c52f */idProduct
> > grep c52f
> > grep c349 */idProduct
> > ...
> >
> > ... but I can't find it in the doc :(  A few examples would be so
> helpful.
>
> See the description of "fc" in zshbuiltins(1).  No examples, though.
>
> --
> vq
>
>

-- 
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>