Comments on: 15 Examples To Master Linux Command Line History

By: acebee

acebee — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:18:18 +0000

excellent – reminds me of time spent distant past in bengaluru on a certain floor sitting on a old as400..

By: BUKUMI OLUYEDI

BUKUMI OLUYEDI — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:22:40 +0000

Kindly apprise more on the LINUX COMMANDS. I am a undergraduate student of computer engineering from Nigeria.

By: Abhijit

Abhijit — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:35:33 +0000

Awesome work Ramesh !!! Kudos to your efforts.

By: Abdullah nawash

Abdullah nawash — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 08:58:48 +0000

Thank you so much for enlightening us.
use history -d (to delete specific line from history)

By: Seb

Seb — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:20:06 +0000

@ Arun :

export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace:erasedups

By the way, for me on Ubuntu 10.10 with
export HISTIGNORE=”ls:ls -ltr”

ls -ltr still appears in history, I need to set “ls *”

By: Jan Goeteyn

Jan Goeteyn — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:04:47 +0000

Please note that the F8 behavior (= cycling only that part of the history that begins with the characters you typed so far) and is known from the Windows cmd.exe shell, has a linux equivalent by pressing Ctrl r again to find the next previous instance of that word or letter. Subsequently pressing backspace cycles in the oposite direction until you are again at the most recent instance still matching that word or letter.

This also answers the issue from Andy Lee Robinson, who frequently got an overshoot due to his entousiasm to repeatedly enter the Ctrl r command and can’t go back: Use back space to go back.

By: Arun Saha

Arun Saha — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:57:47 +0000

Very helpful indeed!

We saw three uses of HISTCONTROL

export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
export HISTCONTROL=erasedups
export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace

Are they mutually exclusive? What if someone wants both “ignoredups” and “ignorespace”?

By: VJ

VJ — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:31:58 +0000

Thanks a lot , really helpful in finding something that I was looking for.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:32:57 +0000

As far as your request to notify you of a use for an alternate history file, I have one:

We track various users’ commands to determine what the commands were that produced a bad server/result/etc. Users don;t always provide honest answers. So I hide the history file in another portion of the file system and sort them out by user.

However, I do have one question that I have not been able to figure out a solution for.

When I set the HISTTIMEFORMAT to show date and time (%F %T) and also set the HISTFILE to my custom location, the time format is *always* a UNIX timestamp, and never in a user-readable format.

Does anyone have a solution for this?

By: Shivaprakash

Shivaprakash — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:48:13 +0000

Nice tutorial