Bash is the most common and widely used shell in Linux distributions. It provides multiple features and tools to the user for their tasks. One of the useful commands that bash shell provides is the history command. In this article, we will be covering how you can access the command line history on Linux.
Also read: How to change file permissions recursively using Chmod in Linux?
How to access command line history?
There are various ways using which you can access the command line history.
Arrow keys
You can access the command line history using the arrow keys. Using the down arrow key takes you to the recent command you issued, and using the up arrow key takes you to the older commands you issued.
Using file .bash_history
The shell history of the bash keeps track of all the commands issued into the terminal in a file named .bash_history. You can print the content of this file to view the command line history.
cat ~/.bash_history
History command
Using the history command, you can view some of the commands that you issued during your session. You can also replay these commands as and when needed.
You can change the number of commands the file can store using the HISTSIZE environment variable.
HISTSIZE=10
Also read: How to exclude in Grep?
Command line editing
When you get the history of last some commands that you ran, you can see an index number written which each command. If you want to run any specific command from the history, all you need to do is run the “!<index number>” command in the terminal.
!<index number>
Shortcut Keys
You can also use shortcut keys to traverse the list of commands that you’ve already run.
- CTRL + P = scroll up through history
- CTRL + N = scroll down through history
- CTRL + R = Search backward in the history by typing the command until you see the one you want to use.
- CTRL + S = Search forward in the history by typing the command until you see the one you want to use.
- ALT + F = Move across the line, word by word in forward direction.
- ALT + B = Move across the line, word by word in backward direction.
- CTRL + A = It will take you to the beginning of a command line.
- CTRL + E = It will take you to the end of a command line.
- CTRL + K = Deleted the complete line.
Also read: Bashrc vs Bash_profile
