Irb's readline history

Ruby
1

irb is nice, because is uses readline. I can press to bring to
life previously typed lines. That’s good. But if I exist irb and then
return to it the history is gone. So it’s not like bash(1) and mysql(1)
that save the history is a file. Or is it? Is it possible to make irb
save the history in a file so that I don’t have to retype everything if
I restart it?

2

But if I exist irb and then return to it […]

I meant: “if I exit”. Not “if I exist”. Sorry about the spam.

3

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 4:01 PM, Albert S. [email protected]
wrote:

irb is nice, because is uses readline. I can press to bring to
life previously typed lines. That’s good. But if I exist irb and then
return to it the history is gone. So it’s not like bash(1) and mysql(1)
that save the history is a file. Or is it? Is it possible to make irb
save the history in a file so that I don’t have to retype everything if
I restart it?

Yes.

Utility Belt (http://utilitybelt.rubyforge.org/) enables this and many
other tweaks.

–
Avdi

Home: http://avdi.org
Developer Blog: Avdi Grimm, Code Cleric
Twitter: http://twitter.com/avdi
Journal: http://avdi.livejournal.com

4

Albert S. wrote:

irb is nice, because is uses readline. I can press to bring to
life previously typed lines. That’s good. But if I exist irb and then
return to it the history is gone. So it’s not like bash(1) and mysql(1)
that save the history is a file. Or is it? Is it possible to make irb
save the history in a file so that I don’t have to retype everything if
I restart it?

Put this in your .irbrc:

IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 100