Re: [Help-bash] History Expansion (J.B.)

[J.B.]

On 01/30/2016 09:00 AM, address@hidden wrote:

> I'm not too clever with history. I find that I don't use it that much, if
> I did I'd be using zsh, not bash (they have a much more evolved history
> setup).
> Also, your command will not exit until you terminate it manually, that's
> what tailf and tail do, so I'm confused as to why your expecting to read
> multiple file in since your command entails that you intend to monitor
> the one log file for sometime.
> That being said, if your just looking to play with the history rreally
> quick try UppArrow, Ctrl-w, (edit the part you want), Ctrl-y (to add the
> stuff you killed).
> If you want to get one line from each file and wait for more whilst
> grep'ing those lines you could do.
> tailf -n1 /some/really/long/path/to/a/logfile \
> /some/other/really/long/path /and/now/a/third/path \
> | grep -iw "some\|neat\|things\|to\|grep"

Hi David.

Currently this is what I'd do after terminating the tailf command:
1. Ctrl-P
2. Ctrl-A
3. Alt-F several times until I got the the end of the long file name
4. Ctrl-W to delete the file's absolute name
(or Alt-D several times from the beginning of the filename)
5. type out the new path to the next file I want to tailf

What I'd like to do instead is use history commands to quickly replace the long 
file path/name with a different one.

What I've more recently tended to do is Ctrl-P, Ctrl-X Ctrl-E (or `fc -e vim' if $EDITOR 
is set to emacs or nano) and edit the command line using vim's efficient editing 
commands. But I'd really just like a way to tell bash, "replace that long string 
that matches '!?really/lon?:%' with 'some/other/file'." (plus, vim's filename 
completion is way too slow (^X^F)).

But the closest I can get is `!:s/"type the entire file name"/"type the new file 
name"', which is a real drag.

Something else that is a bit more useful is to specify the file name first 
(with a redirect), which shortens the distance the cursor has to move:
< path/to/file tailf -n 1 [etc ....]

But that assumes I don't just mindlessly bang away at the keyboard, which is a 
bad assumption. (I'd be in so much trouble if bash didn't accept flags/options 
scattered throughout the command line).
ls /path/to/a/file -Fd /and/another/file/here -lt