commandline(1)

NAME
commandline - set or get the current commandline buffer

  Synopsis
commandline [OPTIONS] [CMD]

  Description

•   CMD is the new value of the commandline. If unspecified, the current value of the commandline is written to standard output. All output from the commandline builtin is escaped, i.e. quotes are removed, backslash escapes are expanded, etc..

The following switches change what the commandline builtin does

•   -C or --cursor set or get the current cursor position, not the contents of the buffer. If no argument is given, the current cursor position is printed, otherwise the argument is interpreted as the new cursor position.

•   -f or --function inject readline functions into the reader. This option can not be combined with any other option. It will cause any additional arguments to be interpreted as readline functions, and these functions will be injected into the reader, so that they will be returned to the reader before any additional actual key presses are read.

The following switches change the way commandline updates the commandline buffer

•   -a or --append do not remove the current commandline, append the specified string at the end of it

•   -i or --insert do not remove the current commandline, insert the specified string at the current cursor position

•   -r or --replace remove the current commandline and replace it with the specified string (default)

The following switches change what part of the commandline is printed or updated

•   -b or --current-buffer select the entire buffer (default)

•   -j or --current-job select the current job

•   -p or --current-process select the current process

•   -t or --current-token select the current token.

The following switch changes the way commandline prints the current commandline buffer

•   -c or --cut-at-cursor only print selection up until the current cursor position

•   -o or --tokenize tokenize the selection and print one string-type token per line

If commandline is called during a call to complete a given string using complete -C STRING, commandline will consider the specified string to be the current contents of the commandline.

  Example
commandline -j $history[3]

replaces the job under the cursor with the third item from the commandline history.