Bash – How to exit bash history search mode

bashcommand historycommand line

In Ubuntu 12.04 I use CTRL–R to enter a reverse history search. If the command I want is not found (after repeated CTRL–R), how do I immediately exit back to the (empty) command prompt with no historical command entered or executed on the command line?

Best Answer

CtrlG this will abort the search

Related Solutions

Command-Line Bash History – Put History Command onto Command Line Without Executing It

To request that the command be printed rather than executed after history substitution, add the :p modifier, e.g. !42:p. The resulting command will also be entered in the history, so you can press Up to edit it.

If you have the histverify option set (shopt -s histverify), you will always have the opportunity to edit the result of history substitutions.

The fc builtin gives limited access to history expansion (no word designators), and lets you edit a previous command in an external editor.

You can use !prefix to refer to the last command beginning with prefix, and !?substring to refer to the last command beginning with substring. When you know what you're looking for, this can save a lot of time over history | less.

Another way to search through previous history is incremental search: press Ctrl+R and start entering a substring of what you're looking for. Press Ctrl+R to go to the previous occurence of the search string so far and Ctrl+S if you've gone too far. Most keys other than Ctrl+R, Ctrl+S, Backspace and ordinary characters terminate the incremental search and have their usual effect (e.g. arrow keys to move the cursor in the line you've reached, Enter to run the command).

Bash – How to Navigate within bash’s Reverse Search

You can access this via the forward-search-history function which is bind per default to ctrl+s. Unfortunately ctrl+s is used to signal xoff per default which means you can't use it to change the direction of the search. There are two solutions for solving the problem, one disabling sending the xoff/xon signaling and the other change the keybinding for forward-search-history

Disable xon/xoff

Run stty -ixon in your terminal or add it to your ~/.bashrc. This allows you to use ctrl+s to use the forward-search-history history function.

For more information about control flow have a look at How to unfreeze after accidentally pressing Ctrl-S in a terminal? and some of the answers

Change the keybinding

If you don't want to change the default behavior of ctrl+s you can change the keybinding for forward-search-history with bind. As most keys are already defined in bash you may have to get creative:

bind "\C-t":forward-search-history

This will bind ctrl+t to forward-search-history, but please be aware that per default ctrl+t runs transpose-chars