Re: subsitutions and beginning of lines.

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter,

A few niggles with the substitution thing:

$ history -10

   85* s h okIFS
12586* freshensource
12587* cp Navtools/navtools Source
12588zsh
12589  echo "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?"
12590* echo "Thou art more lovely and more temperate"
12591  echo "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May"
12592* echo And Summer's lease hath all to short a date"
12593* history -10

... it all lines up like North Korean soldiers.  ('85' is of course 
ancient, but it would line uptoo if it was in the output.)

So, my 'h' wrapper is an incremental colorized 'grep' of history output:

   $ echo "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?"
   $ echo "Thou art more lovely and more temperate"
   $ echo "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May"
   $ echo "And Summer's lease hath all to short a date"

   $ h 100 to

   print -r - $history[-5,-1]
   print -lr - $history[-5,-1]
   print -l - $history[-5,-1]
   print -l - $history[-1]
   print -r $history[-1]
   cp Navtools/navtools Source
   echo "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?"
   echo And Summer's lease hath all to short a date

    $ h 100 to 'a date'

    echo And Summer's lease hath all to short a date
**       ******

... Each search parameter is colorized incrementally.  (I add the minus 
sign automatically) It now strips off the leading stuff as we've 
discussed.  Code as I have it now is:

    OLDIFS=$IFS
    IFS=$'\n'
var=($(eval history $nnumber $sstring))

     echo "${(F)var[@]//#???????/}"
     IFS=$OLDIFS

... where $nnumber is obvious and $sstring is put together like this:

    while [ -n "$1" ]; do
      sstring="$sstring | grep '$1'"
      shift
    done

So, the 'eval'ed expression ends up like:

'history -100 | grep --color=always to | grep --color=always 'a date' | 
... '

(Pardon the long lead-up)

So ... the issue is that if I use your method it's much simpler *but* 
when the
splittings and joinings and all the rest of that invisible stuff happens 
the outputno longer lines up because double spaces become single spaces 
whereas
double spaces are needed for the brutal ' //#???????/' substitution to work
properly.

Is there an elegant solution? My code is obviously cumbersome.A more 
refined substitution could fix it, but on principal I want to leave 
doublespaces alone without needing to play with $IFS.All this splitting 
stuff is wonderful when it works, but there are times when I wish I 
could turn it all off.