How to Use Your Bash History in the Linux or macOS Terminal

To change this default behavior and make it to instantly save each command you have executed, you can make use of PROMPT_COMMAND. You might know the basic use of history command, but it can do a lot more than that. Bash history is usually stored in the file ~/.bash_history.

Press Ctrl-R and start typing to interactively search history . As you can see below, the output now includes the date and time when the commands were executed. The first is to determine which line from the history list should be used during substitution. The second is to select portions of that line for inclusion into the current one. In this example, I pressed ctrl+R and then provided the search string ‘ar’. Please note that this change in format is temporary and it will be restored to the previous standard when you close the session.

• Now, run the below command to rerun a command prepended with sudo, perhaps the touch command, from the Bash history.
• For instance, you can type CTRL + R, and begin typing part of the previous command.
• This means that if you are logged in with multiple bash sessions, only the last one to exit will have its history saved.

Your values are now active for your current shell and any subshells. This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer. Once you’re there, you may want to open that license file again to double check, this time in a pager like less. Rather than thinking of these as separate key combinations, it may help you to think of them as a single compound operation. You can just hold the CTRL key down and then press A, R, Y, and then the R key down in succession. If you try searching with CTRL + S again now, it should work as expected to allow you to search forwards.

Viewing the Bash History

For instance, you can type CTRL + R, and begin typing part of the previous command. If it matches an unwanted command instead, you can press CTRL + R again for the next result. You can also execute commands relative to your current position by using the ! -n syntax, where “n” is replaced by the number of previous commands you want to recall. By default, bash writes its history at the end of each session, overwriting the existing file with an updated version. This means that if you are logged in with multiple bash sessions, only the last one to exit will have its history saved.

Now, run the history command alone to view the Bash history. Fortunately, you can get this information by setting the date and time format of the Bash history in the HISTTIMEFORMAT variable. Bind – Set or display readline key bindings to recall history. History expansions are introduced by the appearance of the history expansion character, which is ‘! Only ‘\’ and ”’ can be used to escape the history expansion character. Bash’s history command surpasses all other Linux shell history interfaces in the number of features it offers.

The output displays the result of ‘lscpu’ which was listed as command number 95 in my bash history. This command displays my CPU and operating system specifications. Increase HISTSIZE – the number of commands to remember in the command history . Increase HISTFILESIZE – the maximum number of lines contained in the history file . We can control the way bash saves our command history through the HISTCONTROL variable. We can specify it to ignore duplicate entries, and/or to ignore entries with leading white spaces.

The Linux bash has a very powerful command called “history”. This command is a built-in bash command that is used to extract history information about commands that have been executed by Linux users in all previous sessions. In this tutorial, we will enable you to get the most out of your shell history by learning the proper use of the history command. Linux stores the command history for a particular user in a ~/.bash_history file by default.

#Modify bash history buffer and file size

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You’ve seen how to view the Bash history and control the number of commands to view. But what if you like to find a particular command in your Bash history and don’t remember exactly what it was? Piping other commands, like grep, to the history command will do the trick. The “on” in the output shows histappend option is enabled and the commands will be appended in the history file instead of overwriting. While “off” shows, histappend option is disabled and the file will be overwritten. An example of this would be to view the oldest 4 executed commands with the keyword “java”.

S/old/new/
Substitute new for the first occurrence of old in the event line. The delimiter can be
quoted in old and new with a single backslash. The final delimiter is optional if it is the last character on the input line.

Using all the arguments from the previous command

In the above image, you can see a list of all commands with a number assigned to each of them. The number 1 command corresponds to the first command you ran and the last numbered command represents the latest command you executed. Event designators search through your history by event. An event in this context is a command logged in your history, delineated by a newline character. In other words, it’s one line, marked by an index number for reference. For that reason, the history function in each shell is unique, so what you use in Bash may not work in Tcsh or Fish or Dash, and what you use in those may not work in Bash.

Perform history substitution on the args and display the result on the standard output, without storing the results in the history list. If offset is positive, it should be specified as it appears when the history is displayed. This may be combined with the other options to replace the history list completely.

How to Use Your Bash History in the Linux or macOS Terminal

For example, history -d 2-4 deletes commands 2, 3, and 4 from our history. HSTR can also manage your command history or bookmark your favorite commands. Next, add a local volume to store the command history.

There are a few ways that you can scroll through your bash history, putting each successive command on the command line to edit. If you have a non-root user, update your Dockerfile with the following. Replace user-name-goes-here with the name of a non-root user in the container.

Each user account has its own history file with a separate command history. With knowledge of bash history, you can work more efficiently at a Linux terminal. The information we covered here should help you handle most of the common bash history use cases you’ll encounter. It’s common for users to have multiple terminals open for the same user account, and this is where things can get tricky. In this tutorial, we learned that while printing out the entire history contents is not that useful, optimizing the output with the commands we learned is the real game-changer. Bash by default only saves the session to the bash history file once the session ends.

Add Date and Timestamp to Bash History

Next, you must clear the current history in your shell session with history -c. Here are some common 10 Awesome Kid-Friendly YouTube Channels for Kids Interested in Coding modifiers and what they do. Note that the space after the %F and %T is useful for formatting the output. Without the spacing, the date, timestamp, and command would all run together. In the sections below, we’ll explore how these aspects of bash history work. HSTR is a command line utility that brings improved bash/zsh command completion from the history.

& Repeat the previous substitution (made with s/old/new/ ). If “&” is used before a transformation has been stored you will get the error ‘no previous substitution’
g Cause changes to be applied over the entire event line. Used in conjunction with ‘s’, as in gs/old/new/, or with ‘&’. The bash shell stores the history of commands you’ve run in your user account’s history file at~/.bash_history by default. For example, if your username is bob, you’ll find this file at /home/bob/.bash_history.

You’ll need to add these to your user account’s .bashrc file to have these values automatically set in every bash session you start, if you prefer that. Because your history is stored in a file, it persists between sessions. You can run some commands, sign out, come back the next day, and those commands will still be in your history file ready to view and use.

While you are on the command line, you can navigate through previously run commands and also recall some recently used commands by providing a keyword. We will The Ultimate Digital Marketing Salary Guide for 2022 use the Linux terminal application to execute the commands mentioned in this tutorial. Ignorespace – eliminates commands that begin with a space history list.

A common use case for this is if you are modifying a file and realize you’d like to change to the file’s directory to do operations on related files. Using shortcuts like this may seem tedious at first, but it can be quite useful when you get used to it. It is extremely helpful when you find yourself How to Display Programming Code in a Blog by Pierre DeBois CodeX in a position where you’ve typed out half of a complex command and know you’re going to need the history to finish the rest. If you need to go the other direction, the down arrow key traverses the history in the opposite direction, finally bringing you back to your current empty prompt.