irb history not working

ruby irb
quinn picture quinn · Jan 14, 2010 · Viewed 20.6k times · Source

in ~/.irbrc i have these lines:

require 'irb/ext/save-history'
#History configuration
IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 100
IRB.conf[:HISTORY_FILE] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.irb-save-history"

and yet when i run irb and hit the up arrow nothing happens. also the irb history file specified is not getting created and nothing is logged to it.

Answer

Wayne Conrad picture Wayne Conrad · Jan 14, 2010

irb history works in Debian Linux out of the box. There's no etc/irbrc, nor do I have a ~/.irbrc. So, hmmmm.

This person put a bit more in his irbrc than you did. Do you suppose the ARGV.concat could be the missing piece?

require 'irb/completion'
require 'irb/ext/save-history'
ARGV.concat [ "--readline", "--prompt-mode", "simple" ]
IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 100
IRB.conf[:HISTORY_FILE] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.irb-save-history"

Related questions

how to get the current working directory's absolute path from irb

I'm running Ruby on Windows though I don't know if that should make a difference. All I want to do is get the current working directory's absolute path. Is this possible from irb? Apparently from a script it's possible using …

Read More
Ruby: How to load a file into interactive ruby console (IRB)?

I am using IRB (interactive ruby console) to learn how to program with Ruby. How do I load a file into the console if I write my programs in a text editor first?

Read More
A JSON text must at least contain two octets

I received this error, and I couldn't find any reasonable answer to this question, so I thought I'd write a summary of the problem. If you run this snippet in irb: JSON.parse( nil ) You'll see the following error: TypeError: …

Read More