Re: greater-than + number sign = newlines in history

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Sun, 3 May 2020 15:58:59 +0200
    From:        Tobias Wendorff <tobwen@gmx.de>
    Message-ID:  <0c8f8899-0421-0aa7-2ecd-2167018c3924@gmx.de>

  | Is this behavior planned or unplanned? The problem doesn't seem to
  | appear on Bash 4 (Debian Jessie, Cygwin on Windows).

Not for me to say, but I'd expect unplanned (ie: a bug).

  | On IRC, an user gave me the hint to set `shopt -s lithist`, which seems
  | to work. The documentation of `lithist` is very ambiguous, so I don't
  | know the downside of this option.

Interesting, an option I haven't used.   If it acts like it says it should,
the only downside should be the appearance of multi-line history entries,
for the command

        while sleep 4
        do
                echo awake
        done

instead of the normal

        while sleep 4; do echo awake; done

in the historu, you get the original, with the newlines embedded
(though it appears some semi-colons are still added), that is, I got

        while sleep 4;
        do
        echo awake
        done

(I didn't really type the indented "echo" as shown above).
That ';' is harmless.   The longer form just makes history entries
occupy more vertical space, and be slightly harder (IMO) to edit,
otherwise there should be no difference.

kre