How do I search my command-line history for commands I used before?

Question

Other than viewing the history, is there a way to filter my history?

Say I want to search for a command that started with "ssh"?

Answer 1

Press Ctrl+R and type ssh. Ctrl+R will start search from most recent command to old one (reverse-search). If you have more than one command which starts with ssh, Press Ctrl+R again and again until you find the match.

Answer 2

If you just want to search your history, you can just use history | grep ssh, substituting ssh for whatever you want to search.

Answer 3

Pressing Ctrl+R will start "reverse-i-search" mode, typing "ssh" would search your history for commands which contain "ssh".

Answer 4

I do a slight variation of the above, works well for me (if you're referring to your bash history

In my home folder I create a file named

.inputrc

Inside goes this

"\e[5~": history-search-backward
"\e[6~": history-search-forward

Then typing however much of a previous command I wish & using the page up/page dn buttons searchs the history, always starting with page up

Answer 5

I found the following function somewhere on the Internet and have used it to great effect. Put this in your ~/.bashrc:

hgrep () { 
    history | egrep --color=auto --recursive "$@" | egrep --color=auto --recursive -v "hgrep $@"
}

Now re-load your shell: exec bash. You now have a new command, which you can use like so:

hgrep ssh

It will show you a list of matching commands from your history. To run a command, type ! followed by the command number. Here's an example:

~:$ hgrep scp
  207  tn scp foreign-teachers __HOST__:unity.log __HOST__:compiz.log .
  421  tn scp scott-laptop __HOST__:Scott\ Severance.asc .
  422  tn scp scott-laptop __HOST__:'Scott\ Severance.asc' .
  468  tn scott-desktop scp -r Backgrounds/* __HOST__:Pictures/Backgrounds
  469  tn scott-laptop scp -r Backgrounds/* __HOST__:Pictures/Backgrounds
  470  scp -r Backgrounds/* 192.168.1.2:Pictures/Backgrounds
~:$ !207

I like this approach better than Ctrl+R because it allows much more flexible searches, and I can see multiple results at once.

Answer 6

Here's another method using classic commands (more likely to work across distros). Command history is stored in the file .bash_history in your home directory, so you can do this:

grep "ssh" ~/.bash_history

Don't forget the -i flag if you need case insensitive search.

Answer 7

If you use shell in Emacs (M-x shell) you can use M-r (it is equivalent to Ctrl+R in a terminal).