this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
5 points (100.0% liked)
Shell Scripting
120 readers
2 users here now
From Ash, Bash and Csh to Xonsh, Ysh and Zsh; all shell languages are welcome here!
Rules:
- Follow Lemmy rules!
- Posts must relate to shell scripting. (See bottom of sidebar for more information.)
- Only make helpful replies to questions. This is not the place for low effort joke answers.
- No discussion about piracy or hacking.
- If you find a solution to your problem by other means, please take your time to write down the steps you used to solve your problem in the original post. You can potentially help others having the same problem!
- These rules will change as the community grows.
Keep posts about shell scripting! Here are some guidelines to help:
- Allowed: Release Announcement of a command-line program designed for scripted use (e.g. bash, bats, awk, jq, coreutils/moreutils)
- Allowed: Tutorials on using shell languages or supplementary tools designed for scripted use
- Allowed: Code review/help requests for shell languages or supplementary tools designed for scripted use
- NOT Allowed: Announcement of a CLI or TUI program that is not designed for scripted use (Yes, your fancy Zsh plugin which pretty-prints the date and time using only builtins is very cool, but unless you actually want to discuss the code itself, please check out !commandline instead!)
- NOT Allowed: Domain-specific tutorials that do not involve shell scripting as a core component (e.g. docker-compose, ansible, nix). If you really love one of these, I'm sure there's a community out there ready to talk about them!
- NOT Allowed: Code review requests for non-shell programming languages and configuration languages (e.g. Python, Yaml)
In general, if your submission text is primarily shell code, then it is welcome here!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think the issue is that
history
is a shell built-in and not an actual program (ie. external command) and it typically only works in an interactive shell session.A workaround could be to access the
$HISTFILE
directly:Of course, you can use also just do:
if you are opposed to the
cat
at the beginning.I tried using cat but I got the same result. I must admit I wasn't aware that history is a shell built in and not a program. Given that is the case, would it not be very difficult to get the contents of history int o a temporary file from a shell script as I am attempting to do? Here is the new line which I attempted:
{cat $HISTFILE | grep -e 'pacman -S\s' -e 'pacman -R\s' -e 'yay -S\s' -e 'yay -R\s' | tail -n 50} > ~/history_installed
An alternative to making a shell script is to make an alias or a function instead. That way, it runs in your current shell session and you can access the
history
command.Additionally, you could always dump the output of the history command outside the shell script and then run the shell script on that file after you have dumped it.
I managed to get it working with an alias, not sure how it didn't come to me before! I am however still curious if it is possible to achieve the same result through a script, and if so how that would be done, so if its alright I'll leave this unmarked as solved for a short while longer in the hope a solution is given by someone. Thank you!