Is there any way to automatically save command history to a file in cmd.exe, similar to bash's bash_history? - command-line

I am aware that one can do
doskey /history
to save the command history at a particular point in time, but I wonder if there's a way to proactively save command history to a file, as the commands are being issued.
Once a command prompt is closed, the history is lost, so it's easy to accidentally close a command prompt when one is done.
I'd like to be able to say something like:
log Commands.log
and then issue my commands, and have the commands be saved to Commands.log.

You could create a doskey macro to remap the EXIT command, as follows:
doskey exit=doskey/history$g$gc:\temp\commands.log$texit $1 $2
This would append the contents of your command history into a file named "c:\temp\commands.log" each time you exit the prompt by typing "exit".
CAUTION: I haven't tested potential side effects of using this with EXIT's "/B exitCode" parameters, but there shouldn't be any since you're capturing the parameters with "$1 $2" anyway.
This doesn't do exactly what you're looking for, but it does capture your command history as long as you exit using EXIT (vs. just closing the window).
More info and samples on DOSKEY macros are here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490894.aspx

I know it is late but I can see two alternatives.
Firt clink or something more complete that include cmder
Each time you will open cmd it will be clink and it works great

As Novy has already said, try Clink; but also use the following link so it also works in admin mode.
run cmd with clink as administrator in windows to save your command history permanently

Related

Editing WSL2 instance of Ubuntu Crontab using Windows VSCode

My question is whether it is possible to edit the crontab of a WSL2-based instance of Ubuntu with my Windows VSCode that is connected via WSL remote SSH.
If I type export EDITOR=code inside my WSL instance and then crontab -e, I am able to see a /tmp/crontab.sygFAU file load inside my VSCode instance.
The problem is that once I make edits to this file, it will save the file to /tmp/crontab.sysFAU but it doesn't actually take the next step of replacing the the real crontab file in /var/spool/cron/crontabs.
So once I re-open the crontab, it will just show what I had previously, and not my saved edits.
It would be nice to know if this is not possible or if there are any alternative ways to run a GUI editor because using nano is a pain!
An interesting question that I haven't considered before, myself. Here's what's happening:
You set your editor to code
You crontab -e, which properly loads VSCode with the temporary crontab.
However, because this is a Windows GUI application, it returns control to the parent Linux application (crontab) immediately after starting VSCode. You can see the same result if you just start notepad.exe from your shell in WSL -- Once Notepad starts (rather than exits) control is returned to the shell.
If you switch back to your terminal at this point, you'll see that crontab detected that the editor that it launched exited (returned), and so it has already tried to copy the temporary file to the permanent location.
However, since the temporary files doesn't yet have any changes, crontab decides there's nothing to do.
Editing the file in VSCode and saving it has no effect, other than to leave a dangling /tmp/... file hanging around (since crontab isn't there to clean up).
So what's the solution? We need a way to launch a Windows GUI application and prevent it from returning control to crontab until you are done editing.
I originally thought something from this question might work, but the problem is that the actual command that launches the Windows process is embedded in a shell script, which you can see with less "$(which code)" (or code "$(which code)"), but it's probably not a great idea to edit this.
So the next-best thing I came up with is a simple "wrapper" script around the (already-a-wrapper) code command. Create ~/.local/bin/code_no_fork.sh (could be anywhere) with:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
code $* > /dev/null
echo Press Spacebar to continue
read -r -s -d ' '
Credit: This answer for the Spacebar approach
Then:
EDITOR=~/.local/bin/code_no_fork crontab -e
After you make your edits in VSCode, simply press Space to allow the script to continue/exit, at which point crontab will (assuming no errors were detected) install the new Crontab.
Alternatives
This is should typically only be a problem with Windows GUI applications, so the other possible avenue is to simply use any Linux editor that doesn't fork. If you want a GUI editor, that's entirely possible as long as you are running a WSL release that includes WSLg support (now available for Windows 10 and 11).
I won't offer any individual editor suggestions since that would get into "opinion" and "software recommendation" territory, which is off-topic here.

cmd line arg to run a one shot session, preserving last session

I want to use VS Code as Joplin external editor without erasing the cached session.
Actually my command is code -n, I did not find a solution on https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/command-line are there other commands ?

Weird CMD - VSCode behavior

yesterday I had SumatraPDF and VisualStudioCode with latex-workshop working with forward and reverse-search. Today the reverse-search didn't work any more. With a simple bat file I tried to show the commandline arguments.
echo %*
pause
They seemed correct and when I copied the command and paste it into a new cmd it works. To do further testing I tried to direct command and run it.
"C:\....\Code.exe" -g "%1:%2"
pause
Visual Studio Code responds: bad option -g
In SumatraPDF I set cmd as command.
Now the behavior is that I have two cmd windows. With the cmd directly opened the VSC open's the file. With the cmd launched indirect I got the error message.
I have tried resetting the environment variables, changing the current working directory, and checking the code page currently in use.
How can it be that cmd behaves differently with seemingly the same environment? And what can I do to make a cmd started from an application work like a cmd started by windows?
Update: It appears there were a couple of recent security changes in the way VSCODE.exe is allowed to interact with the command line (especially affecting LaTeX-workshop users) so for recent changes twice this year see the discussion at https://forum.sumatrapdfreader.org/t/inverse-search-not-performed-for-vs-code-exe/4486/27
Within SumatraPDF the reverse syntex command for %1 is replaced by %f for file and (l)L for line
It is triggered by a double click near the line of interest and if the synctex index file was compiled correctly by PdfLaTeX (or similar) it will include the tex %f(ilename) and the nearest %l(ine) reference to the point where double clicked.
Thus your tex syctex enhanced "reverse search" call out of SumatraPDF should historically be
"C:\...path to...\Code.exe" -g "%f:%l"
that's Lower L not 1
Avoid using any depreciated -inverse-search parameter from a LaTeX editor just add it once into SumatraPDF-settings.txt and then it's not disturbed by repeated assignments when running your -forward-search.
It will NOT work if the file.synctex or file.synctex.gz is corrupt by a bad PDF compilation.
HOWEVER It seem Microsoft have added the requirement to add a CLI.js handler and requires another switch setting after that ! (see link to discussion in Update above)
For a small test file download https://github.com/GitHubRulesOK/MyNotes/raw/master/AppNotes/SumatraPDF/LATeX%20and%20Reverse-Search.zip unpack and open sync.pdf in SumatraPDF to test that double click on page opens sync.tex in the editor
If the message is cannot start ... then the command line is not configured correctly. A rough test for a bad synctex is to see what happens if the call is changed by adding cmd /k echo to the start, since that will confirm the reverse command. Here I wrote "wrong" as the path to code.exe, once corrected I can remove cmd /k echo.
For some other systems where the reverse might change
see https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/issues/1197#
However there should be no interference in a valid VsCode call.

How to run a applescript to enter a terminal command

I have been messing around with voice commands, but ran into a snag. I am trying to get a terminal command to run but it is not working. The command makes asterisks "snow" fall.
This is what I have so far.
tell application "Terminal"
activate
run script "ruby -e 'C=`stty size`.scan(/\d+/)[1].to_i;S=["2743".to_i(16)].pack("U*");a={};puts "\033[2J";loop{a[rand(C)]=0;a.each{|x,o|;a[x]+=1;print "\033[#{o};#{x}H \033[#{a[x]};#{x}H#{S} \033[0;0H"};$stdout.flush;sleep 0.1}'"
end tell
All I get are errors
Command line scripts executed with the do shell script command. The string escaping can get a bit gnarly, so be careful with that too. Here's a simple example:
do shell script "say \"Today is `php -r \"echo date('l');\"`\""
EDIT:
OK, I just realised your script actually depends on having a Terminal window to run in, so the usual approach of do shell script won't work here.
There are still a lot of unescaped quotation marks in your Applescript, but rather than fixing those, I think it would be easier to put the whole ruby script into a stand-alone file and pass that to Terminal instead.
stars.rb
#!/usr/bin/ruby
C=`stty size`.scan(/\d+/)[1].to_i;
S=["2743".to_i(16)].pack("U*");
a={};
puts "\033[2J";
loop {
a[rand(C)]=0;
a.each {
|x,o|;
a[x]+=1;
print "\033[#{o};#{x}H \033[#{a[x]};#{x}H#{S} \033[0;0H"
};
$stdout.flush;
sleep 0.1
}
AppleScript
tell application "Terminal"
activate
do script "~/stars.rb"
end tell
An easy way to escape a shell command for AppleScript is to save the command in a text file. Run the script below and copy the Result.
set myText to read (choose file) as «class utf8»

How do I get the "Command Buffer" in Solaris 10?

When working on a linx CShell u get the option to press the up / down arrows to select the last command/s typed or the Command Buffer. This even works on Windows.
However this is not functional when working on Solaris, to which i recently switched. I am guessing that the shell is also a CShell.
Please tell me what key combination is required to have this feature on Solaris ?
The default shell in Solaris has command history, but you can also use Bash instead, it's more user friendly. Just type 'bash' (no quotes) at the command line. You can also edit /etc/passwd to make bash your default shell.
The "official" default shell for Solaris is actually sh, the original Bourne shell (see Chapter 10 of the Advanced User Guide for Solaris for more info). If you'd like to change it to csh or tcsh—and you're not root (it's generally considered bad practice to use anything but sh as root's default)—just issue passwd -e /path/to/shell_of_your_choice <loginname>. I'm guessing this would probably look like passwd -e /bin/csh <loginname>, but you'd probably want to make sure it exists, first.
It may be that it's the Korn shell in which case try <ESC>k.
bash at least will allow you to switch modes with "set -o vi" or "set -o emacs".
Maybe you can use the !! command, to repeat the previous one.
Use "echo $SHELL" to see what your login shell is. If it's ksh or bash, try "set -o emacs". If that works, you'll be able to use ^P to go back a command. ^R lets you search for a command, ^F and ^B to move around within the command.
If you can´t change your default shell, or you just want to try out one that works, you can kick off any other shell from your command line. I recommend you tcsh, which will have good command line editing and history using the arrow keys. Type /bin/tcsh at your prompt to try it out. You can use the earlier responses to change your default shell if you like tcsh. Make sure your have the following in your $HOME/.cshrc file:
set filec
set history=1000 # or some other large number
set autologout=0 # if you are logging in remotely under your account.
I hope this helps.
You enable history temporarily if you use BASH by typing
HISTSIZE=1000
which will enable up and down keys and store 1000 commands. After termal disconnetion all history will be gone.
This works on solaris 10.
For permanent solution add these lines to ~/.bashrc
HISTSIZE=1000
HISTFILESIZE=1000