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Madison May
Madison May

Reputation: 2753

Python: get output of the shell command 'history'

My end goal is capture the previous command executed in the terminal. Since ~/.bash_history doesn't include commands from the current terminal session, I can't simply read that file.

From another thread, I found this script:

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE, STDOUT
shell_command = 'bash -i -c "history -r; history"'
event = Popen(shell_command, shell=True, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE, 
    stderr=STDOUT)

output = event.communicate()

That's pretty close to what I'm looking for, but it also will not include the history from the current terminal session since it's started as a subprocess. Is there any way to execute a similar command in the current shell?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 4102

Answers (1)

edi_allen
edi_allen

Reputation: 1872

why don't you read the file directly. ~/.bash_history

for history in open('/home/user/.bash_history'):
    print(history, end='')

Upvotes: 6

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