Instead of Changing History Characters

If you need to use ! (or your current history character) for a command (most often, a uucp or mail () command), you can type a backslash () before each history character. You can also drop into the Bourne shell quickly (assuming that you aren't on a system that has replaced the real Bourne shell with bash). Either of these are probably easier than changing histchars. For example:

% mail ora\!ishtar\!sally < file1Quote the !s % sh Start the Bourne shell $ mail ora!ishtar!sally < file1! not special here $ exit Quit the Bourne shell % And back to the C shell

The original Bourne shell doesn't have any kind of history substitution, so ! doesn't mean anything special; it's just a regular character.

- ML