Shell Command History – Best Way to Search Through Shell’s History

command historyshell

Is there a better way to search my history file for a command than grep? I do have some idea what the command starts as, but I don't know how far back in the history it is.

update: was formerly zsh specific but due to overlapping answers feel free to answer for any shell (or mode (vi/emacs)) here, just note if it is specific.

Best Answer

Ctrl+R is usually the best way, as descriptor said. You can also use !string, which runs the most recent command starting with string, or !?string?, which runs the most recent command that contains string.

_{(I think that's the only stuff relevant to this question, but I covered much more of the history commands in this answer)}

Related Solutions

bash security zsh command-history – How to Keep a Command from Being Added to Your History?

In ZSH:

First insert setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE to your ~/.zshrc. Now after you log in again, you can prefix any commands you don't want stored in the history with a space. Note that (unlike bash's option of the same name) the command lingers in the internal history until the next command is entered before it vanishes, allowing you to briefly reuse or edit the line.

From the user manual, the following 3 options can be used to say that certain lines shouldn't go into the history at all:

HIST_IGNORE_SPACE don't store commands prefixed with a space
HIST_NO_STORE don't store history (fc -l) command
HIST_NO_FUNCTIONS don't store function definitions

Bash – Programmatically Add Entries to Bash History with Proper Timestamps

I posted this question on the help-bash mailing list and got a response from Chet Ramey, the maintainer of Bash.

He suggested adding either of the following before the history -s command:

set -H    # aka set -o histexpand

histchars='!^#'

I tried each of them and they both work. The reason is that the history comment character which defaults to # hasn't been set at the point that the profile code is running and so is null (\0).

Here's my working file:

HISTTIMEFORMAT='%c : '
histchars='!^#'
set -o history
history -s "# some text as a marker"

Best Answer

Related Solutions

bash security zsh command-history – How to Keep a Command from Being Added to Your History?

Bash – Programmatically Add Entries to Bash History with Proper Timestamps

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