Get previous command history number from a script

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Article #4008

#4008

From: Ben
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:44

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I've already figured out a way to do this but I suspect there are
simpler/faster/more elegant solutions that exist.

The objective is to get the command history number of the command that
was just executed, but do it from a script (which seems to prevent
access to the $HISTCMD variable, which would've been nice; any
thoughts on this?). Here's my solution:

history 2| sed -n 1p| sed -e "s/^\s*\([0-9]\+\).*/\1/";

Notice the (command complexity) / (problem complexity) ratio. Can
anyone improve it?

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From: Ben <bgold12@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,gnu.bash
Subject: Get previous command history number from a script
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 00:44:04 -0700 (PDT)
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