efficient use of the history command from terminal prompt

Message

mikefot · Post by **mikefot** » Sat May 02, 2020 4:29 pm

Dear All,

I am interested to try to improve my practical skills and efficiency a bit when running commands from the terminal
when running gentoo.

Supposing you have a list of commands that you regularly run one after the other in gentoo.

If you wanted to have a convenient way to repeatedly run them consecutively in the same order you could
put them in a file and make it executable and then run a job either interactively or in background mode that would then run
each command in sequence for you.

But you could also (as I do) use the history command to list those commands in sequence showing the last time you issued them all
one after the other yourself by hand.

What I do is to use the exclamation mark symbol and the number of each command and then submit that to the terminal
by hand iteratively increasing the integer number by plus one as I go along.

E.g.

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chump# !5
chump# !6
chump# !7
chump# !8

etc.

It works quite well I find.

OUt of interest, is there a command which would run them one after another something like this:

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champ# !5-8

where what was implied was to execute the above sequence of commands one after the other ie commands 5 through 8 in the history list?

Suggestions welcome.

Regards

Michael Fothergill

Post by Hu » Sat May 02, 2020 5:33 pm

You could separate the history expansions with semicolons instead of newlines.

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$ !4; !5; !6

You could use && if you want to stop early on error.

mikefot · Post by **mikefot** » Sat May 02, 2020 5:48 pm

Many thanks for your response and suggestion.

I tried your recommendation out with a series of commands that allows me to
create a chroot environment for gentoo running on top of a debian install I have on
my laptop.

It worked.

I assume I could repeat this as the collective set of commands would be listed as one command entry in the history listing.

I will check this.

I think this can save me a lot of time and reduce errors.

Regards

MF

dmpogo · Post by **dmpogo** » Sat May 02, 2020 10:38 pm

My most common history use is to do

!beginning of a command

say

!pdf usually to runs pdflatex file.tex which I am currently working on, or !eclean usually means eclean -d distfiles etc. There is a danger to get a wrong one, of course, but I do know my workflow usually.

Post by Hu » Sat May 02, 2020 11:18 pm

If you are unsure what you will get, you can direct the shell to expand without executing by using history-expand-line, which is bound to Meta ^ (you may need to type Escape, Shift+6 to get this). If you routinely want to do this, use shopt -s histverify, so that pressing enter rewrites the command line to be what you would run, and pressing enter again runs it.

dmpogo · Post by **dmpogo** » Sun May 03, 2020 7:07 am

Hu wrote:If you are unsure what you will get, you can direct the shell to expand without executing by using history-expand-line, which is bound to Meta ^ (you may need to type Escape, Shift+6 to get this). If you routinely want to do this, use shopt -s histverify, so that pressing enter rewrites the command line to be what you would run, and pressing enter again runs it.

Nice tip, thanks !

Jaglover · Post by **Jaglover** » Sun May 03, 2020 10:47 am

I'm so used to type the first letter or two and then PgUp that everything else seems too complicated.

Post by **Banana** » Sun May 03, 2020 3:49 pm

Jaglover wrote:I'm so used to type the first letter or two and then PgUp that everything else seems too complicated.

+1

mike155 · Post by **mike155** » Sun May 03, 2020 4:38 pm

I'm so used to press the 'cursor up/down' keys a couple of times that everything else seems too complicated. Even the PgUp/PgDown keys are too far away...

Post by **Banana** » Sun May 03, 2020 6:39 pm

ok, what's next?
Typing to complicated?

Jaglover · Post by **Jaglover** » Sun May 03, 2020 6:55 pm

Methinks Amazon has this Alexa thing? How about porting it. You tell Amazon what you want and they type it in for you. They will also record and store everything you do, all for your convenience.

mv · Post by mv » Sun May 03, 2020 7:31 pm

zsh-autosuggestions

Makersmarx · Post by **Makersmarx** » Sun May 03, 2020 7:40 pm

mike155 wrote:I'm so used to press the 'cursor up/down' keys a couple of times that everything else seems too complicated. Even the PgUp/PgDown keys are too far away...

Agree with this or just ctl + R as I am easy to please

mikefot · Post by **mikefot** » Mon May 04, 2020 11:15 am

Many thanks for all the feedback and suggestions on this.

When I ran the command with the list of individual commands separated by semi colons the history
algorithm strung them all together in one long expression with semi colons in between like a wrapped around daisy chain.

It works a treat.

I have rerun it several times after booting into the debian OS that I put gentoo on inthe chroot environment.

I recommend it.

The Alexa suggestion sounds good. I am sure you could have some fun with that.....

Cheers

MF