a command line history

Not often am I moved to promote any piece of software, but this one deserves a nobel peace prize or something: I can finally stop kicking my cat in frustration.

I am sure you old-time Linux gurus will yawn and say "yeah, yeah...been doin' that for AGES!", but some of us youngsters have been moaning relentlessly how Oracle's SQL*Plus on Linux isn't half as good as it is on, gulp, Windows because of the lack of a certain up-arrow capability to retrieve old commands.

Well, help is at hand. A pathetically small (all 23KB of it) utility called rlwrap can be used to make a command line history available to all in Linux.

Nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with earning money. I merely post as someone who saw it and cried "Thank the Lord and her mighty minions of the escutcheon and barnacles for that!!" when I saw it. Well, sort of.

And yes, I know things such as "gqlplus" do something similar. But this works for lsnrctl, rman, exp, imp and anything else you care to throw at it.

Anyway: if you know about it and think "Crikey! Where's he been all these years?", fair enough. And if you didn't know about it, and this helps you switch to Oracle-Linux, then I am happy for you. And Paul Burgess should be proud (so Richard can buy him a drink next time he's in Canberra. Mind you, if you're ever in Canberra you need more than a drink to get you over the fact....)

<Shameless Plug> Explanatory article and download at
http://www.dizwell.com/html/a_command_line_history.html
</Shameless Plug>

Regards
Happy as Anything JR Received on Mon Nov 15 2004 - 06:10:37 CST