Issue
I can get a list of the line numbers matching a specific pattern such as containing the word "function".
history | grep function | sed -e 's/^\(.\{5\}\).*/\1/' | sed 's/^ *//g'
If I do history -d on that it says bad pattern, I don't know if it's as it's a list or their strings rather than numbers?
history -d (history | grep function | sed -e 's/^\(.\{5\}\).*/\1/' | sed 's/^ *//g')
Solution
Quick answer:
while read n; do history -d $n; done < <(history | tac | awk '/function/{print $1}')
Explanation:
The history command accepts only a single offset when using the -d flag. On top of that when you delete an entry, it also renumbers all the commands after this entry. For this reason we revert the output of history using tac and process the lines from last to first. This short awk line just replaces the grep and sed command to pick up the history offset.
We do not use a full pipeline as this creates subshells and history -d $n would not work properly. This is nicely explained in: Why can't I delete multiple entries from bash history with this loop
Note: If you want to push this to your history file ($HISTFILE), you have to use history -w
Warning: When you have multiline commands in your history the story becomes very complicated and strongly depends on various options that have been set. See [U&L] When is a multiline history entry (aka lithist) in bash possible? for the nasty bits.
Answered By - kvantour Answer Checked By - Robin (WPSolving Admin)
