Re: subsitutions and beginning of lines.

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/13/2015 05:23 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> What defines a "hit" here?  Your "history" command isn't "searching"
> AT ALL.  Rather it's your series of "grep" commands that are doing
> the searching.  There's no way an argument to the "history" command
> can tell it how many times "grep" of its output is going to succeed.
Yes, how silly of me. history by itself knows nothing of my grepping.  
Duhhhh.
> So it sounds like what you really want is
>
>      eval history -r -n -$HISTSIZE $sstring | head $nnumber
>
> That is, dump the entire history, grep it, and then show the most
> recent few events that match the greps.
Sure, but I was hoping for something a little more delicate.
The -m switch does do some internal finding, so maybe that's the
starting point. Couldn't history count it's matches when the '-m' is used?

    history -M$nnumber "*$sstring"*" ... or something.

Never mind tho.  Working from your example above I come up with:

    $ history -n -m "*$sstring*" 1 | tail -n $nnumber | grep 
--color=auto "$sstring"

And it's very satisfactory.  She burns through the entire history so fast
that there's nothing to complain about.   Thanks Bart.