Quickly save previous shell commands to a script

I wish I had discovered this long ago. With the power of Vim or other editors, it’s a breeze to compose complex, multi-line, or repetitive commands using your favourite editing tool. Writing and quitting in your editor fills in that command at your shell prompt.

Today came the logical leap to using this trick as a rapid way to save previous commands to a script. After finding the previous command in your history (or using ctrl-r for reverse search), in Vim it’s simply a case of ctrl-x-e followed by :w filename.sh to save as a script. A quick save this way is great for making a note of a command you want to make sure you have for the future, especially when it’s a complex command from trial and error that you don’t want to rebuild.

Append to the file (:w >> filename.sh in Vim) to build up your script from commands in your live session. Appending in this way is great when there’s a lot of trial and error in getting a series of commands right, and you want to save just the ones that work correctly as you achieve them.

If you want to go back further in time, or pick and choose multiple commands from your history to put into a script in a single go, then another trick is to pipe in your shell history to your editor:

(Replacing x with the number of lines of history you want to go back). Then delete the history numbering (:%s/^\s*\d\+\s*//g will do it in Vim) and the lines you don’t want; then save to file.

Finally, no need to fret that you’ll lose those long, complex, or multiline commands, or do finger gymnastics to edit them!

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