A .bashrc function to save quick notes/ interesting commands

Question

Often, I want to note down something really quicky when working in the terminal - Something to do, something interesting, etc. So I thought I'd include this function in my .bashrc:

export QUICKY="$HOME/Documents/Notes/quickies"
quicky(){
  if (( $# == 0 )) ; then
    vim $QUICKY
    return
  fi
  for i in $@; do
    echo "$i" >> $QUICKY
  done
}

So this is really simple. A use case would be something like quicky meeting to quicky note about a meeting or something similar. I would just do quicky to read the notes and further organize if I wanted.

Suppose I do something like quicky "Feed the dog", I expect a new line feed the dog in $QUICKY, but every word appears in a new line. How can I tackle this issue?

PS. quicky "!!" would be excellent to quicky note down interesting commands that you want to read about later.

Although suggestions and answers about any other ready-made tools are alright, I would like to know how I'd do this with bash.

Answer 1

You need to quote your variables. Try this:

quickFile="$HOME/Documents/Notes/quickies"
quicky(){
  if (( $# == 0 )) ; then
    vim "$quickFile"
    return
  fi
  for i in "$@"; do
    printf '%s\n' "$i" >> "$quickFile"
  done
}

I changed your variable name so it isn't CAPITALIZED. It's generally better to avoid al caps variable names in shell scripts to avoid name clashes with environment variables. I also used printf since that is a better option for printing arbitrary data.