$HISTCHARS  –  Definition of History Expansion and Comment Parsing (Deprecated)

$HISTCHARS defines how the Zsh shell handles history expansion and how it parses line comments. This variable is deprecated, the lowercase $histchars should be used instead.

The value contains three ASCII characters:

1. Character for a history expansion. Default: !.
2. Character for a quick history substitution. Default: ^.
3. Character to start a line comment. Default: #.

Links

• The Z Shell manual
• The Z shell manual on history expansion
• The Z shell manual on option INTERACTIVE_COMMENTS to enable comments in interactive shells

Examples

Change line comment character for a script

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#!/usr/bin/env zsh # Tell Zsh that underscore _ now start a line comment HISTCHARS[3]='_' _ new line comment echo hello world

Output:

1	hello world