Re: Creating Local History Files

[John W. Eaton]

On  8-Oct-1996, Ted Harding <address@hidden> wrote:

: "history -r FILE" does not seem to do quite what I want. Although the 1.1
: documentation says
: 
: -r file   Read the named file, replacing the current history list with its
:           contents.
:
: it in fact appends, rather than replaces, according to my
: experiments

You are right.  I suppose this is either a bug in the documentation or
the code.  :-/

In any case, it appears that I overlooked a much simpler solution:

  export OCTAVE_HISTFILE=local-histfile
  octave

This will even work in 1.1.1.  :-)

: It looks as if "the next release" is going to prove even more worth while
: waiting for than we had thought!

I know better than anyone that it has been a long time since the last
release.  As always, if anyone is interested in helping to test the
current sources, just send me mail.

I don't know if I have mentioned it here yet or not (and the way
things have been going lately, perhaps I should just keep silent...)
but the last major thing that is holding everything else up is adding
the ability for users to define their own types and link them in on
the fly.  It is almost ready for others to start testing.  I hope this
will turn out to be useful enough to justify the additional delay.

: This discussion prompts me to propose: as well as octaverc (to define the
: startup configuration), how about also an "octavecd" (octave_close_down)
: file which would define any cleanups to be carried out when "quit" is
: executed within octave?

Instead of using a specific file for this, I've added an atexit()
function so you can register any number of functions to call when
Octave exits.  So it should be fairly simple to arrange to execute
commands from a given file if that's what you want to do.

jwe