Re: combining .histfiles

[Kurtis Rader <krader@skepticism.us>]

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For the benefit of anyone lurking on this thread who is confused why those
funky looking lines are syntactically legal (which probably doesn't include
Ray or Bart)... If you look carefully you'll see the format of the histfile
is

  colon timestamp semicolon command

The leading colon is the null command which does nothing with its args and
returns a zero (success) exit status. The semicolon separates it from the
"real" command. So entering something like

  : 1234:5 ; echo hello

is the same as just typing

  echo hello

The colon command is mostly useful when you want the side effects from
parsing the rest of the args without running a command.

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 6:02 PM, Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca> wrote:

> On 10/14/2014 04:55 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
>
>>
>> On Oct 14, 2014 3:24 PM, "Ray Andrews" <rayandrews@eastlink.ca <mailto:
>> rayandrews@eastlink.ca>> wrote:
>> >
>> > I could stop the command on each line  individually,  but not the
>> .histfile *itself*.  Is there some way to
>> > to break out of it?
>>
>> As I said, Ctrl+c should do it.  I just now manufactured a file with a
>> few hundred "cp largefile /dev/null" commands, read it with "." and was
>> able to end it with Ctrl+c before it made it all the way through.
>>
>>  Hmmm, it didn't work here, I hit Ctrl+c a dozen times, it didn't break
> out. I'll try to figure out why.
>
>> On the other hand, you are the first person I've ever heard of make this
>> particular mistake.  :-) :-/
>>
> Well then never mind.  You can be sure I'll never do it again, that is for
> sure! What with the file format, all those leading numbers, it didn't look
> executable so the worst thing is that it was such a huge shock.  Never
> more. But it does make me question what *isn't* executable.
>
>


-- 
Kurtis Rader
Caretaker of the exceptional canines Junior and Hank