Package: bash Version: 4.3-11+deb8u1 Severity: minor In my experience a majority of users - even ones who do quite a bit of work in the shell and understand most of the shell's quoting requirements - are completely unaware of the existence of this feature.
When they encounter it by mistake they don't recognise the error message and don't know what to do. Background: I have this feature turned off in my shell. This led me to foolishly perpetrate a utility which has (in some modes) a syntax like this mg-allocate !somehost I haven't kept proper records, but I think that more than half of the people I have given documentation telling them to run this command, have come back to me saying "I get this error, `bash: !somehost: event not found'". This system is used only by developers, contract sysadmins, and the like. We are not talking about unix neophytes here. My conclusion is that this feature ought to be turned off by default. Those users who use it and like it can enable it. If you don't want to turn it off by default, how about changing the error message to bash: !somehost: !-history event not found bash: To disable !-history expansion, say set +H And then await the hordes of people replying to this bug to say "please why don't you disable it by default?" :-). Regards, Ian. -- Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own. If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.
