Re: history puzzle

["Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@gmail.com>]

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On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 10:01 PM Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca> wrote:

>
>
> On 2024-06-04 17:33, Lawrence Velázquez wrote:
>
> I was reading 'info zsh history'
>
> That shows the "History Expansion" section of the manual, which
> does not mention the "history" builtin at all.
>
>
> Ok, at least that's clear.  I should be using 'info zshbuiltins'.
> 'History Expansion' ... I'm taking that to be what the history command does
> so ... actually now that I look closely, it's obviously the wrong place.
> And 'run-help history' goes somewhere else entirely.
>

The term "history expansion" refers to the expansion of references into the
command history. Those start with *!, *for example:

*zsh% vi path/to/some/file*
*zsh% gcc !$ # compile the file I just edited*

In general, the *!* is followed by a selector that determines which item
from the history you want to copy from. This can be an item number (which
matches the one shown by *history*/*fc -l*), another *! *(which means the
most recent command), or a prefix string (which refers to the most recent
command starting with that prefix, e.g. *!ls* to refer to the most recent
*ls* command). The selector can be followed by modifiers to restrict the
expansion to just part of the command: *:0 *for the command name, *:** for
the arguments without the command name, *:$* for just the last argument,
etc. The *!!:$* expression (last word of the last command) is so common
that it got its own shortcut, the *!$* I used above.

History expansion is purely an interactive command-line feature; it doesn't
work in scripts. If you need to access the history programmatically, use
the *fc* command (or *history*, which is equivalent to *fc -l*).

Anyway, that's what you were reading about. :)
--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>

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