The idea is to make the history file more readable for humans, but also easily importable by other tools.
I don't think there's a library for handling CSV files in Bash, and even if there was, I think it would slow down things a lot, which we don't want because shellhistory happens in interactive shells and we cannot let users wait for more than 200ms between each command. Appending a line to the history file must be as fast as possible.
But the CSV formatting is not hard either, so we could do it by hand. If I remember correctly, you can use any delimiter you want, as long as fields that contain it are enclosed in double-quotes. If these same fields also contain double-quotes, then you must simply double these.
Example with a comma as delimiter:
field 1,,field 3,"hey, I'm field 4!",,"he said ""4""? alright, then I'm gonna say ""6""!",field 7
Same string imported in GNumeric:
It's working, yay!
So instead of encoding parents and working directory in base 64, we could simply enclose them in double-quotes, and use some sed 's/"/""/g on it. And instead of prepending a colon on normal lines, and a semi-colon on extra command lines, we could also simply do the same for the command.
:...:echo "a
;b
;c" | wc -c
would become
...:"echo ""a
b
c"" | wc -c"
Also, just to make sure, we could also enclose hostname and user in double-quotes.
The idea is to make the history file more readable for humans, but also easily importable by other tools.
I don't think there's a library for handling CSV files in Bash, and even if there was, I think it would slow down things a lot, which we don't want because
shellhistoryhappens in interactive shells and we cannot let users wait for more than 200ms between each command. Appending a line to the history file must be as fast as possible.But the CSV formatting is not hard either, so we could do it by hand. If I remember correctly, you can use any delimiter you want, as long as fields that contain it are enclosed in double-quotes. If these same fields also contain double-quotes, then you must simply double these.
Example with a comma as delimiter:
Same string imported in GNumeric:
It's working, yay!
So instead of encoding parents and working directory in base 64, we could simply enclose them in double-quotes, and use some
sed 's/"/""/gon it. And instead of prepending a colon on normal lines, and a semi-colon on extra command lines, we could also simply do the same for the command.would become
Also, just to make sure, we could also enclose hostname and user in double-quotes.