Perserving Command History Across Sessions

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

barrkel — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 10:40:11 GMT

Will there ever be a way to run PowerShell via STDIN / STDOUT rather than in a Win32 console - such that it works in an Cygwin rxvt terminal? Currently, PowerShell appears to use Win32 Console commands to read input - which doesn't work when it's not attached to a console.

I know that it would be far from ideal, but if it used STDIN/STDOUT then one could write a wrapper program that uses Readline and thus supplies nice history etc. support, and allow PowerShell to run in an rxvt terminal.

My bash/rxvt already saves history between sessions, and it can save an arbitrary number of entries (more than 32KB - it works on lines rather than bytes). Rxvt also has nice paging support with Shift+PgUp/PgDn, which is one of the big reasons I don't use the Win32 console. Another big reason is that QuickEdit mode (i.e. mouse causing selection in Win32 console) causes the running application to freeze, while selecting in rxvt copies to the clipboard straight away, no need for pausing or anything. Also, rxvt has bold and underline, as well as colors.

I've tried to use PowerShell, and it's the Win32 console window that's holding me back. I abandoned the Win32 console many years ago.

Here's the stack trace of PowerShell frozen in an rxvt session:

---8<---
ntkrnlpa.exe!KiSwapContext+0x2e
ntkrnlpa.exe!KiSwapThread+0x46
ntkrnlpa.exe!KeWaitForSingleObject+0x1c2
ntkrnlpa.exe!NtRequestWaitReplyPort+0x63d
ntkrnlpa.exe!KiFastCallEntry+0xf8
ntdll.dll!KiFastSystemCallRet
ntdll.dll!ZwRequestWaitReplyPort+0xc
ntdll.dll!CsrClientCallServer+0x8c
kernel32.dll!ReadConsoleInternal+0x1be
kernel32.dll!ReadConsoleW+0x42
mscorwks.dll!CallDescrWorker+0x33
mscorwks.dll!CallDescrWorkerWithHandler+0xa3
mscorwks.dll!MethodDesc::CallDescr+0x19c
mscorwks.dll!MethodDesc::CallTargetWorker+0x20
mscorwks.dll!MethodDescCallSite::Call+0x18
mscorwks.dll!InvokeImpl+0x43f
mscorwks.dll!RuntimeMethodHandle::InvokeMethodFast+0xbd
mscorlib.ni.dll+0x30f629
--->8---

You can see in there the all-important call to ReadConsoleW rather than ReadFileW.

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

bwinzenz — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 22:27:18 GMT

Ahh - that rocks.

Thanks for this info. I very much appreciate it.

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

KeithH — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 22:52:16 GMT

It sure would be nice to be able to hook a "PSExiting" event in a profile script and then save history right before exit.

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

KeithH — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 22:53:33 GMT

BTW, I would change this:

Get-History -Count 1KB

to

Get-History -Count $MaximumHistoryCount

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

PowerShellTeam — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 23:58:34 GMT

> It sure would be nice to be able to hook a "PSExiting" event in a
> profile script and then save history right before exit.

This requires the EVENTING architecture that we'll be working on for V2

RE: -COUNT $MaximumHistoryCount
Great catch!

Jeffrey Snover
Windows PowerShell Architect

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

dontBotherMeWithSpam — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 08:10:07 GMT

For this kind of occasion, I have been thinking about asking this question:

Is there a way to know that powershell is exiting and run whatever the scripts needed to be run instead of using such custom function as "BYE" to persist certain PowerShell states?

Since PowerShell reads profile when starting up, how about a profile file for when PowerShell is "exiting"?(if that functionality had been there, we could execute those commands for persisting history list across sessions.

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

PowerShellTeam — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 22:04:54 GMT

> Is there a way to know that powershell is exiting and run whatever the scripts needed to be
> run instead of using such custom function as "BYE" to persist certain PowerShell states?

This is a perfectly reasonable expectation. We wanted to do this but didn't have the time for V1.0

Jeffrey Snover
Windows PowerShell Architect

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

bwinzenz — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 17:14:01 GMT

Just wanted to leave a quick comment letting you know that the code you included didn't work for me. I am using the Exchange Management Shell (Exchange 2007), and it was throwing errors on a few things.

First, it didn't like the $MaximumHistoryCount = 1KB. I changed it to $MaximumHistoryCount = 1000 and it was happy.

Second, the code:
if (!(Test-Path ~\PowerShell -PathType Container))
{ New-Item ~\PowerShell -ItemType Directory
}

also resulted in an error. Specifically, "A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter 'PathType'"

I simply removed those lines, and everything seems to work fine now. Here is the resulting code that I am using in the Exchange Management Shell.

$MaximumHistoryCount = 1000

function bye
{ Get-History -Count $MaximumHistoryCount |Export-CSV ~\history.csv
exit
}

if (Test-path ~\History.csv)
{ Import-CSV ~\History.csv |Add-History
}

re: Automating PowerShell

PowerShellTeam — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 02:31:52 GMT

Barrkel: There are two ways to use PowerShell without the Win32 console -- either by hosting the engine yourself, or by using the -command parameter. See if this helps your cause:

http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/UsingMshexeInteractivelyFromWithinOtherPrograms.aspx

Lee

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

PowerShellTeam — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 02:36:46 GMT

bwinzenz:

Jeffrey is giving you a sneak preview of an upcoming build :) The Exchange Management shell will soon have this same syntax, but for now you'll have to replace:

1kb with 1k

As for the -PathType option, you can determine the parameter by typing the following:

(get-command test-path).Definition

One of those should be close to "PathType" -- we went through a renaming phase a while back, which is why you see the difference.

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

zelial — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 23:37:24 GMT

Hi and thanks for the code. But I have a problem with the imported history: it can't be traversed interactively (with the up and down arrows). is there a way to let the console know about these new commands in history?

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

Andrew Tearle — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 01:52:29 GMT

In the interests of finding an existing object - perhaps the title could be better expressed as "Preserving Command History ..."

Regards from Aotearoa

Andy

Re: A pop-history Cmdl

Latest Newsgroup Posts — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 20:19:59 GMT

See if this blog entry helps. Perserving Command History Across Sessions [link]

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

Alexi — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:25:51 GMT

Yeah, I second the PSExiting hook request. Is there a general way to hook events in powershell? Some searching turned out dry.

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

PowerShellTeam — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:36:10 GMT

> Is there a general way to hook events in powershell?

Not in V1. We'll take that as a V2 feature request. We checked in that code last night.

Pretty responsive eh?

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

Windows Management Partner Architect

Visit the Windows PowerShell Team blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell

Visit the Windows PowerShell ScriptCenter at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx

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PingBack from http://www.winterdom.com/weblog/2008/02/28/TheCommandHistoryInPowerShell.aspx

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PingBack from http://thought.mobiforumz.com/2006/07/02/mshpowershell-followup/

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PingBack from http://winzenz.mobiforumz.com/2006/07/02/mshpowershell-followup/

re: Perserving Command History Across Sessions

Pat Richard — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 07:40:38 GMT

Is there a way to import the data so that it's available when pressing F7?

And the event driven solution arrived

Neil Fairall — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:02:06 GMT

See http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2008/06/11/powershell-eventing-quickstart.aspx