Re: What does the exit command do?

[John W. Eaton]

On 23-Sep-2004, Francesco Potorti` <address@hidden> wrote:

| >  OCTAVE_HISTFILE=/dev/null octave -qH myfunction.m
| 
| In my humble opinion, this should be the normal behaviour when Octave is
| called with -h.
| 
| What I mean is: when Octave is called with option -h, it shouldn't touch
| the history file.

The reason that this is not the way things work is because -h only
implies an initial value of "saving_history" to be "false".  Later in
the session the value of "saving_history" can be changed to "true".
Then I think the expected behavior would be to save commands to the
history file.  Or, you could start with it set to true and set it to
false part way through the session.  In that case, you would probably
still want to save the differences in the history list that is in
memory.

I think the proper way to implement this feature is at the level of
the history library.  If the history list has not changed, then no
attempt needs to be made to save it.  Octave could probably attempt to
keep track of this information, but I think it more logically belongs
inside the history library.  Perhaps I'm missing something obvious,
but I don't see a simple way to ask the history library (part of GNU
readline) whether the history has been modified.  If someone can show
me how to get this information from the history library or get the
feature added to the readline library, then I would be happy to change
Octave so that it avoids saving the history file if it has not been
modified.

Thanks,

jwe



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