HIST(1)

🌸 HIST(1) — the manual page, but make it make sense 🌸

ok so this is hist(1), from the General Commands Manual — aka the glow-up your file history has been waiting for 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

hist, history — print file names from the dump 🗂️✨

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

hist [ -vdu ] [ -s yyyymmdd ] files ...

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay bestie, listen 🫶 — hist prints the names, dates, and sizes of all versions of the files you name, looking backwards in time, stored in the dump file system. it's giving time travel but make it filesystem 🦋

and like, if the file also exists in the main tree, the first line of output will be its current state — cute little bonus first row 💖

for example, this:

hist ~rsc/.bash_history

produces this:

May 19 16:11:37 EDT 2005 /home/am3/rsc/.bash_history 6175
May 18 23:32:16 EDT 2005 /dump/am/2005/0519/home/am3/rsc/.bash_history 5156
May 17 23:32:31 EDT 2005 /dump/am/2005/0518/home/am3/rsc/.bash_history 5075
May 16 07:53:47 EDT 2005 /dump/am/2005/0517/home/am3/rsc/.bash_history 5065

look at that little timeline slay 🔥

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🎀 the options, one by one 🎀

• -v — enables verbose debugging printout 👀 (yes she's chatty, that's the point)
• -d — causes diff(1) -c to be run for each adjacent pair of dump files 📑 (so you can literally see what changed between versions, icon behavior fr)
• -b — runs diff -cb 💅 (the -b version of the diff situation)
• -u — causes times to be printed in GMT (UT) rather than local time 🌍 (for my UTC girlies)
• -s — sets the starting (most recent) date for the output ⏰ (aka where the story begins)

ngl the way -d and -b are literally described inside the prose and not in the synopsis? iconic of this era of man pages, no notes 💀

✨ EXAMPLES ✨

wanna examine changes in block.c? say less:

hist -d block.c

🎀 boom. diff city. 🎀

✨ FILES ✨

• /dump — by convention, root of dump file system 🌳 (like, by convention, so don't come for me if yours lives somewhere else)

✨ SOURCE ✨

/src/cmd/hist.c 📜

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• yesterday(1)
• vbackup(8)

(go read those too, they're the supporting cast 🫶)

✨ BUGS ✨

skdhfksj okay so — it should be called history, but that name is taken by sh(1) 😭 so we're stuck with hist. tragic. unfair. we cope. 💀

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and that's the whole page bestie — the General Commands Manual, hist(1), printed at the bottom like a little signature 💜