Re: Inconsistent history expansion of characters adjacent to histchar

[Peter Stephenson <p.stephenson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 08 Oct 2013 15:44:04 +0100
Peter Stephenson <p.stephenson@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, 08 Oct 2013 07:31:25 -0700
> Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I'm wondering if backslash ought to be treated specially in more of the
> > history code.  In particular:
> >
> > torch% print !\!; print foo       
> > zsh: event not found: \!
> > torch% 
> > 
> > One might think one could use that form to search for a command line
> > that begins with a literal exclamation point, but no.
> 
> Hmm... the documentation does indeed imply backslash is some sort of a
> quote for history.  Actually, I think it's just talking about escaping
> the initial ! and then goes into its usual "it sort of vaguely works
> like this but nobody ever really thought it through from beginning to
> end" mode.  However, you might think you were morally entitled to have a
> backslash at that point either isolate the backslashed expression from
> what went before (so it behaves just like a single !), or to be treated
> as a string argument, and I would think the second, the one you
> mentioned, is rather more useful.

I put this badly --- I meant, of course, the "!" should be treated as a
string argument, not the "\".

pws