remember

This is an easy way to record shell commands you might want to remember in the future. For example if you’re installing a package, it’s helpful to remember what build options you used. Run remember once before your shell commands, then run your commands, then run remember -s afterwards. The intervening commands will be copied from your bash history (so, you need to be using bash with history enabled). The copied lines get appended to a file (readable only to you) called $HOME/.remember.

% remember how I installed curl
% wget http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.19.7.tar.bz2
% tar xjf curl-7.19.7.tar.bz2
% cd curl-7.19.7
% ./configure --prefix=/home/local
% make
% make install
% remember -s

This is what would be appended to your $HOME/.remember file:

Sat Dec 19 21:45:31 PST 2009
  remember how I installed curl
  wget http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.19.7.tar.bz2
  tar xjf curl-7.19.7.tar.bz2
  cd curl-7.19.7
  ./configure --prefix=/home/local
  make
  make install

Note	`remember` is not a script but rather a bash function that you paste into your `.bashrc` or `.bash_profile`.

For another description of remember, see this blog post.