On 2024-06-05 08:53, Mark J. Reed wrote:

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. :)

I wish I could kill the whole thread, it was a misunderstanding from the getgo. Not the first time I've ended up barking up entirely the wrong tree. And with hindsight it is obvious I wasn't looking at a command -- but I'm so used to being baffled by the manual that I took it as normal ;-)

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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>