Converting a history to a script?

Question

Often times I've typed in a bunch of commands when I realize that I am going to keep typing them in and that I would really like a script.

Now I understand that no matter how I save my history, I am going to have to edit it to clean things up, but would like to hear suggestions on how to save my history so that it is close to a usable script.

Answer 1

If you type history in the shell, you will see a list of recent commands. You can see this to a script by history > my_script or something (or just copy it from the ~/.bash_history file).

From the my_script file you can remove the unnecessary commands, add the shebang line, typically #!/bin/bash, and make it executable chmod +x my_script and you're done.

Answer 2

The way i'd approach this is:

history -a - add new lines to history file

ctrl-x, ctrl-e - open an editor to make a quick script (in vi, for me)

:r ~/.bash_history | tail -n 20 - read in the last 20 commands from history file.

Answer 3

A different approach could be to use an editor with a macro language.

• Import a bunch of lines with cut and paste
• Filter out output of the commands by grepping for your prompt
• Remove the prompt from the beginning of lines
• insert a shebang at the beginning of the file

A significant prompt will help to make this work in most cases. For session sizes of more than a few screen pages, it will not be very comfortable.