Rails console history command (via pry) -- can it be grepped or tailed?

history, irb, pry, ruby-on-rails

Solution

You can use `~/.irb-history` for this purpose. So, the following can be used (you must be knowing how to do this, but this is only for reference):

tail -fn0 ~/.irb-history  # for tailing
cat ~/.irb-history | grep something # for searching

Note that, you might have both the files: `~/.irb-history` and `~/.irb_history`, and any one of them can be more up to date than the other. I have not been able to resolve this mystery yet. So, use the one you find more suitable for yourself.

UPDATE: You can access history in a variable using the following logic (it took me a while to read the code Pry uses, try `edit history` inside pry):

 def pry_history
   arr = []
   history = Pry::History.new
   history.send(:read_from_file) do |line|
     arr.push line.chomp
   end
   arr
 end

Now, you can simply call `pry_history` to get an array of pry's history. You can further save it inside your `.pryrc` configuration file and use it whenever you want in pry.

Problem

In Rails 4 `rails console` I can type `history` and it will behave just like the `history` command from the bash shell. E.g.: ``` [25] my_rails_project » history 1: Nomination 2: {:ad => "asdfsdasadf"} 3: Nomination.count 4: Nomination.count.to_sql 5: Nomination.all.class 6: Nomination.all.to_sql ... ``` Is there a way to search that history, e.g. `history | grep Nomination`? How about tail? Note: When I initially wrote this question I thought the `history` command came from Rails itself, but it comes from the `pry` gem which I have in my system (my Gemfile specifies the `jazz_hands` gem which pulls in pry). Pry does in fact have a `grep` feature, e.g. `history --grep Nomination` will give me lines 1 and 3-6 above. It also has a `tail` feature. These are documented here: https://github.com/pry/pry/wiki/History

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