Dear Bash and Readline Experts, I have a simple shell script that reads user commands in a loop using "read -e". -e enables readline, but not its history feature. Is there any way to get readline history with bash's read builtin?
I wouldn't want to get the user's regular bash history; rather, this program would need its own history file in the user's home directory. For example: read -e --historyfile=~/.myprogname_history CMD If there's no way to do this with the read builtin, perhaps there's an existing standalone readline wrapper program that can do this? I imagine it would only need a dozen lines of code. However, it wouldn't be possible to retain the syntax of the read builtin w.r.t. variable names: CMD=`read_with_history -e --historyfile=~/.myprogname_history` If such a program doesn't yet exist, I'll write it; let me know if you would find the code useful. Searching has found some other wrappers (e.g. 3 at packages.debian.org) that solve the slightly different and more complex problem of wrapping an entire program that doesn't use readline so that it does use it for all input. That's not what I need in this case. Thanks for any advice. Phil.