[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #60111] History gets polluted with too many comment lines

[anonymous]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?60111>

                 Summary: History gets polluted with too many comment lines
                 Project: GNU Octave
            Submitted by: None
            Submitted on: Wed 24 Feb 2021 10:15:03 PM UTC
                Category: Interpreter
                Severity: 3 - Normal
                Priority: 5 - Normal
              Item Group: Other
                  Status: None
             Assigned to: None
         Originator Name: 
        Originator Email: 
             Open/Closed: Open
                 Release: dev
         Discussion Lock: Any
        Operating System: GNU/Linux

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Details:

Hello,

This is unusual behavior I have not seen earlier. If anyone has a workaround
suggestion I will try it. The core problem is that when Octave is started it
injects a comment line like this into the history file:


# Octave 7.0.0, Wed Feb 24 12:46:13 2021 EST <user@host>


This has become a problem recently. I have a directory with several thousand
binary .mat files that are the results of months worth of parallel runs. I
have needed to run something like this from the bash prompt a few times to
gather statistics for example:


for i in *.mat
do
    octave --eval "load $i; disp(size(var,1));"
done


Unfortunately I found out the hard way that invoking thousands of instances of
"octave --eval" added that many lines of time stamp comments to the history,
and now all earlier useful Octave commands have been removed from history.

I will work around this in future by not invoking "octave --eval" from the
shell prompt to do statistics.

Are there workarounds for the following?

1. Prevent Octave from adding anything to history when being invoked as
"octave --eval". After all, the actual command after eval is not stored, only
the comment about when Octave was invoked, which is useless in this context.

2. Optionally, maybe prevent Octave from storing time stamp comments at all?




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