Re: multi-line commands in the history get split when bash is quit

[Michael Witten]

On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 15:56, Slevin McGuigan
<slevin.mcguigan@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I am unsure whether or not this a bug.

>From what I can tell, it's not so much a bug as it is an inadequacy:
When you quit bash, the history is stored very naively in "$HISTFILE";
the history is simply dumped to it line-by-line, and each line of the
file is later interpreted by a new bash instance as a complete command
line input. Hence, the multi-line nature of your command input is lost
between dumping it to "$HISTFILE" and later populating the history
from "$HISTFILE".

The solution would be to invent a more robust file format for "$HISTFILE".