Linux history Command

In Linux, we can use “history” command lists and annotates the last 1000 commands issued in the terminal emulator. Each command has a number associated with it.

The GNU history command keeps a list of all the other commands that have been run from that terminal session, then allows you to replay or reuse those commands instead of retyping them.

history Command Syntax

>> history

history Command Example

Run the history command to see a list of the last 1000 commands. You’ll see that all the listed historical commands are given a unique reference number.

>> history

>> clear
>> ls
>> ls -l
>> sleep 10 &
>> history

The history command shows a list of the commands entered since you started the session.

The joy of history is that now you can replay any of them by using a command such as.

>> !2

The !2 command at the prompt tells the shell to rerun the command on line 2 of the history list.

Note: You can also use history to rerun the last command you entered by typing !!

history 15 Command Example

Reissue the history command but constrain the amount of results to a specific number.

This is useful if you know roughly when a command you are looking for was issued.

You should see only the last 15 results listed.

>> history 15

history | less

history | less to view just the last ten commands, you can use the following.

>> history | less

history | tail

history | tail to view the last 25 commands.

>> history | tail

Searching history

You can also use history to rerun the last command you entered by typing !!. By pairing it with grep, you can search for commands that match a text pattern or, by using it with tail, you can find the last few commands you executed. For example:

>> history | grep  "clear"

  136  clear
  141  clear -x
  142  man clear

>> history | tail -n 3

  94  ls | tail
  275  tail outout.txt
  276  tail output.txt
  277  tail output.txt -n 10

Another way to get to this search functionality is by typing Ctrl-R to invoke a recursive search of your command history.

Now you can start typing a command, and matching commands will be displayed for you to execute by pressing Return or Enter.

history Pipe with egrep -i to Multiple Command Search

>> history | egrep -i 'scp|ssh|ftp'

history -c (delete all)

The -c option causes the history list to be cleared by deleting all of the entries:

>> history -c

CTRL + r

To get previous command containing string, hit [CTRL]+[r] followed by search string:

>> (reverse-i-search)