[MLUG] tip of the week: Making good use of ~/.inputrc

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I'm sure that you can learn a great deal about inputrc files from reading 
some of these web pages...

http://www.google.com/search?q=inputrc

...and these man pages:

man readline

...but I have one simple piece of advice:  If you don't have one already, 
make a file called ~/.inputrc containing these two lines:

"\M-p": history-search-backward
"\M-n": history-search-forward

For me, this adds important functionality to bash and to Octave, and 
probably to some other programs.

> From "man bash"

  history-search-forward
         Search  forward through the history for the string of characters
         between the start of the current line and the point.  This is  a
         non-incremental search.
  history-search-backward
         Search backward through the history for the string of characters
         between the start of the current line and the point.  This is  a
         non-incremental search.

Example.  Suppose you want to recall a command from your bash command 
history and you remember that it began with 'perl.' You may have used perl 
in many pipes since then, so if you were to use Ctrl-r to search previous 
commands, and you were me, you would see all of these things that you 
didn't want to see...

less `which perlseq`
man perlpod
pod2man `which perlseq`
pod2man `which perlseq` > perlseq.1
man -M . perlseq.1
man -M . perlseq
mv perlseq.1 man/man1
man -M . perlseq
man -M ./man perlseq
pod2man `which perlseq` | man
pod2man `which perlseq` | man -
man -M ./man perlseq
less `which perlseq`
man -M ./man perlseq
man -M ./man perlseq
foreach sec ( `perlseq 1 1000` )
foreach sec ( `perlseq 1 1000` )
head -10 mult_combo.ped | perl -pe 's/^ +// ; s/ +/ /g ; s#/# #g' | less
head -20 mult_combo.ped | perl -pe 's/^ +// ; s/ +/ /g ; s#/# #g' | cut -d' ' -f 7 | less
head -12 mult_combo.ped | perl -pe 's/^ +// ; s#/# #g ; s/ +/ /g' | cut -d' ' -f -9 | numalign > merlin.ped
foreach N ( `perlseq 01 22` )

...and more that I have deleted!  The trick is to type just the first few 
letters of the command and then hit Alt-P repeatedly.  This will scroll 
through previous commands that began with those letters.  If you go too 
fast and pass the one you were looking for, use Alt-N to scroll forward. 
This feature works in bash only if you have the ~/.inputrc described 
above.  The same is true for newer versions of Octave and any other 
programs that use the readline library.

By the way, the term "\M-p" (meaning Meta-p) refers to the use of a "Meta 
key," but this key does not exist on most keyboards and Alt is used 
instead of Meta.  If Alt doesn't work on some system, you can usually 
succeed with Esc p (Esc, ralease, then p).

Mike

--
Michael B. Miller, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Division of Epidemiology and Community Health
and Institute of Human Genetics
University of Minnesota
http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/

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