Charly's Column – Shell History
Charly's Column – Shell History
For admins like Charly, who try to avoid typing at all costs, the shell offers an excellent opportunity to avoid wear on your fingertips in the form of built-in history.
There are commands that I type several dozen times a day – grep <something> /var/log/syslog is such a classic. The shell keeps a history of all my entries; thanks to the history command, I can always see in a numbered list which commands I typed last.
The history command is not a separate tool; typing which history at the command line just drops you into a black hole. Instead, history is a part of the shell, a built-in keyword. history's killer feature, for which lazy people like me are eternally grateful, is the interactive search. You enable it with Ctrl+R, changing the command-line prompt to (reverse-i-search)`':.
If you start typing now, for example, the word net, the shell will show you the last command typed containing net. When you press Ctrl+R again, the history feature shows you an increasing number of older commands that contain net (Figure 1).
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