Bash – How to prevent edited commands from overwriting the original? Or revert edits

If it refers to commands run just recently, a more efficient way is to reference them with negative numbers:

!-4; !-3; !-2; !-1

Also, once you do it, your last history entry will contain the whole chain of commands, so you can repeat it with !!.

Edit: If you haven't already, get familiar with the great builtin function fc, mentioned by Gilles. (Use help fc.) It turns out that you can also use negative numbers with it, so you could do the same as above using

eval "`fc -ln -4 -1`"

This has one caveat, though: after this, the eval line is stored in the history as the last command. So if you run this again, you'll fall into a loop!

A safer way of doing this is to use the default fc operation mode: forwarding the selected range of commands to an editor and running them once you exit from it. Try:

 fc -4 -1

You can even reverse the order of the range of commands: fc -1 -4

You might want $HISTIGNORE: "A colon-separated list of patterns used to decide which command lines should be saved on the history list." This line in your ~/.bashrc should do the job:

HISTIGNORE='rm *:svn revert*'

Also, you can add a space at the beginning of a command to exclude it from history. This works as long as $HISTCONTROL contains ignorespace or ignoreboth, which is default on any distro I've used.