Digital Adventures of Cyril Pauya

If you have been using Ubuntu (or any Unix variant), you should now know that there is a history command which keeps track of the commands you have executed in the shell.  I have been using Ubuntu for a few months and my history command list is now at 500+ commands.

Here are some of the basic uses of the history command:

> history

• this lists all commands you have executed in the shell

> history | more

• same as above but only shows a page of list
• press spacebar to move to the next page
• press the letter q to quit displaying history commands
• the | is a pipeline which means redirect the output of the history command as input to the more command

> history | grep <text>
example:
> history | grep ls
> history | grep rsync

• lists only the shell commands that contains the text after the grep command
• grep basically is a command line text search utility

> man history

• help manual of the history command
• very helpful documentation I must say!

Since I started using Ubuntu, I have been wondering how do I get to issue the 100th command in the list.  I looked at the manual and did not understand it at first.  Just today, tired of typing a long list of rsync command, I looked at the history manual again and noticed the Event Designators section.

Event Designators

An event designator is a reference to a command line entry in the history list.

!    Start a history substitution, except when followed by a blank, newline, = or (.

!n   Refer to command line n.

and a lot more options down the line.

Out of instinct, I typed:

> history !100

and got the error message of:

bash: history: ln: numeric argument required

Giving a sheepish grin, I tried:

> !100

and the 100th command in the history list gets executed!

Talk about being silly, it took me about 2 months to finally figure that out.

Now that’s an interesting lesson in Ubuntu history ain’t it?