In this article I will give examples of viewing and clearing the history of entered commands in the Linux terminal.
View the full history of entered commands and the last 10 entered commands:
history
history 10
To re-execute the command from the history, you can type:
!command_number
To re-execute the previous one:
!!
To re-execute the penultimate one:
!-2
To execute a previously entered command starting with the letters ixnfo:
!ixnfo
To execute a previously entered command containing the letters ixnfo:
!?ixnfo?
View the very first 10 entered commands:
head -n 10 ~/.bash_history
View the last 10 entered commands:
tail -f -n 10 ~/.bash_history
Counting the number of lines in a file:
wc -l ~/.bash_history
Settings for storing the history of entered commands are stored in the ~/.bashrc file, for example:
HISTFILE – path to the history file
HISTSIZE – the number of lines stored in the interpreter memory
HISTFILESIZE – the number of commands stored in the history file
etc.
You can also view a specific parameter by typing “echo PARAMETER” in the console, for example:
echo $HISTFILE
Clearing the history of entered commands:
history -c
Removing from the history of a specific command entered:
history -d COMMAND_NUMBER
Append the commands entered in the current session to the end of the file:
history -a
Disabling the history of entered commands:
set +o history
Enabling the history of entered commands:
set -o history
See also my article:
Linux User Administration