How to use the history command in Linux

The history command holds a list of all the other commands that have been run since that Terminal session, then allows you to view or reuse those commands instead of re-entering them. If you are an experienced Terminal user, you will know the power of the history command. Let's find out more details through the following article!

See a list of the commands used

To see how the history command works, open a Terminal and type:

$ history

The response you receive should be something like this:

1 clear 2 ls -al 3 sudo dnf update -y 4 history

How to use the history command in Linux Picture 1 The history command holds a list of all other commands that have been run since the Terminal session

The history command shows you a list of commands entered since you started the session. The advantage is that you can now re-execute any option using the command:

$ !3

Command ! 3 at the prompt tells the shell to re-run the command on line 3 of the history list. You can also access that command by typing:

$ !sudo dnf

This will prompt the history to find the closest command matching the pattern you provided (in this case, that template is dnf ) and run the command.

Execute used commands

You can also use history to re-run the last command entered by typing !!. By pairing it with grep , you can either search for commands that match a sample of the text, or by using it with tail , you can find a couple of commands that are closest to you that you have executed. For example:

$ history | grep dnf 3 sudo dnf update -y 5 history | grep dnf $ history | tail -n 3 4 history 5 history | grep dnf 6 history | tail -n 3

Another way to access this search is to type Ctrl + R to invoke a recursive search for the command history. Once imported, the prompt will change to:

(reverse-i-search)`':

Now you can start typing a command, and the matching commands will be displayed for you to execute by pressing Return or Enter.

Executed command changes

You can also use history to re-run a command with a different syntax. You can edit history with the history command. For example, if you want to change the previous command history history | grep dnf to history | grep ssh , you can execute the following command at the prompt:

$ ^dnf^ssh^

The command is run again, but with dnf replaced with ssh. In other words, the command to be run is:

$ history | grep ssh

Clear history

There may be times when you want to delete some or all of the commands in your history file. If you want to remove a specific command, enter:

history -d row_number=""

To delete the entire contents of the history file, execute:

history -c

The history file is also stored in a file that you can modify. The Bash shell user found it in his home directory as .bash_history.

Some other uses

There are a few other things you can do with the history command:

1. Sets the size of the history buffer to a certain number of instructions
2. Record the date and time for each line in history
3. Prevent some commands from being recorded in history

Kareem Winters

Update 06 October 2020