Bash – Zsh: make the up arrow skip identical commands

bashcommand historyzsh

In most Unix shells, the arrow-up ↑ key replaces the command that is being edited by the previous command in the history.
The history can be seen using the command history.

↑ can be pressed more than one time to climb up in the history.

My question is:

How can I configure my shell so that ↑ skips all commands identical to the current one?

Indeed I often enter many make in a row. When I want to enter again (or modify slightly) an older command I have to hit ↑ many times just to skip all the make commands.

I know that ↑ is far from being the only tip that increase shell productivity.

bonus:

  • give a configuration working for the Bash shell.
  • preserve the history (knowing that you typed a command many times in a row can be useful)

Best Answer

For zsh put this in your configuration:

setopt histignoredups

What it does, it will ignore duplicated history entries during search.

The equivalent setting for bash is

HISTCONTROL=$HISTCONTROL:ignoredups
Related Question