Re: append to history entry?

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 27, 10:23am, Ray Andrews wrote:
}
} Seriously, I wish I knew if stuff like that really is part of the best 
} of all possible worlds or if it is a case of fundamental errors in 
} design of the first shells

Neither, really.  It's a case of gradually accumulating requirements
on what shells do, rather than any flaw in the original design.  In
the original design you'd have relied on external programs for all
of this stuff.

} Can't we have "print --Just-Do-It" ?

That's what the -r option is, but print doesn't control how its
arguments are processed as part of the command line parse, which is
necessary for what you asked about.

Seriously, you can't ask for a way to muck with something that is
normally handled transparently by the shell internals and then gripe
about having to replicate some of that hidden processing.  Well, you
can, but it doesn't really help. :-)

Daniel is rather dogmatic about handling edge cases that I tend to
ignore for the sake of not throwing out all the details that make you
"take it on faith" (a phrase that makes ME grind my teeth whenever you
write it).

} One thing tho Bart, it seems it should be 'echo' because when the 
} command line is recalled and executed, the colon throws an error

It shouldn't.  There's no difference between "echo" and ":" except
that ":" discards its arguments without printing them.  If you're
getting an error on ":" you've done something else to cause it.

What error?