Fish – How Does History Work in Fish Shell?

command historyfish

I'm a bash user, starting a new job at a place where people use fish shell.

I'm looking at the history command which I often use in bash. When I use it in fish I get a long list of my history which I can scroll up and down on with the arrow keys.

There are no numbers like in bash and pressing enter is the same as the down key.

How can I run a past command with fish shell's history?

Best Answer

The history command here isn't bash-compatible, it's just displaying it in a pager (e.g. less).

To select an old command, you'll probably want to enter the part you remember right into the commandline, press up-arrow until you have found what you want and then press enter to execute.

E.g. on my system I enter mes, press up and rm -I meson.build appears (with the "mes" part highlighted). I then press enter and it executes.

Related Solutions

Bash – read with history

You can use rlwrap for this, if you don't mind installing software.

You'll probably want to keep a separate history file that only maintains history for the particular prompt in your script (ie. avoid mixing with the user's shell command history).

Here's an example that might work for you:

#!/bin/sh
# Save in rlwrap_example.sh

HISTORY=$HOME/.myscript_history
USERINPUT=$(rlwrap -H $HISTORY sh -c 'read REPLY && echo $REPLY')
echo "User said $USERINPUT"

$ ./rlwrap_example.sh
hello
User said hello

In the above script, the user can use all GNU readline functionality, with history served from — and stored in — ~/.myscript_history. Tweak as needed.

Alternatively, you can use bash's read -e, which enables readline for read invocations, but you will probably find its history functionality too limited (ie. almost nonexistent).

Bash – How to revert from searching to original command

Ctrl+K will kill the text from the cursor to the end of line. so If you haven't moved the cursor, Ctrl+K will give you (ie, effectively revert to) your original text

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – read with history

Bash – How to revert from searching to original command

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