Re: history puzzle

What the . . . oh, I had history aliased for some reason, to history -t %FT%T 0. Convenient when I type it by itself, but too late for -m by the end of it; I so rarely use the command that I didn't notice I'd restricted myself that way. Sorry for the added confusion.

(I replaced it with a function that only adds those arguments if I didn't supply any already.)

I still think from Ray's mention of "words" that he was reading documentation about history expansion rather than pattern-matching.

So, OK, -m option restricts the list of history entries printed out to those matching the pattern. The argument is a glob pattern of the sort used to match files, not a regular _expression_. Even if it were a regular _expression_, though, ^ and $ would still match everything, since every string has a beginning and an end. So I'm not clear what your goal was.

If you have extendedglob turned on, then ^ is negation; ^foo matches anything that doesn't match foo, so ^ again matches everything. If you don't have extendedglob turned on, it's not special at all, and ^ looks for an entry exactly equal to nothing but "^". And $ is not special either way, so that is again looking for an entry consisting of nothing but a single dollar sign, and not surprisingly failing to find one.

On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 4:21 PM Lawrence Velázquez <larryv@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, Jun 4, 2024, at 3:49 PM, Ray Andrews wrote:
> On 2024-06-04 11:12, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>> What's "history -m"? Doesn't that just look for items in the history
>> containing "-m"?
> The Devil! Had that in my function for years, thought it meant 'pattern
> following'. Nuts, it works:
>
> 5 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 1 % history -rn "grep*" 1
> fc: event not found: grep*
>
> 5 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 1 % history -rnm "grep*" 1
> grep c52f */idProduct
> grep c52f
> grep c349 */idProduct
> ...
>
> ... but I can't find it in the doc :( A few examples would be so helpful.

See the description of "fc" in zshbuiltins(1). No examples, though.

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vq