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!

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