How can I do the `history` command and not have line numbers so I can copy multiple line commands?

Question

Sometimes I do the history command so I can see 4 commands in a row.

I want to copy those commands so I can run them again.

I usually select them with the mouse and shift-ctrl-c which works ok, but I also get the line numbers.

How can I do history and not have line numbers?

I tried the man page but was overwhelmed.

Answer 1

Using awk:

history | awk '{$1="";print}'

Answer 2

Note that history output may depend on local environment. On my machine it looks as:

 $ history | tail -1
 2993  2012-08-13 17:42:17 echo "test"

and none of your answers will work at my side.

A useful option is fc (usually it is builtin) which works perfectly independent from your local settings.

fc has -n option that suppresses numbers in output. So your command would look like:

fc -l -n

it outputs only the several last commands.

To output the whole history in this style use:

fc -l -n 1  

To output without spaces at the begin you can use sed to remove them:

fc -l -n 1 | sed 's/^\s*//'

Answer 3

In bash:

history | tr -s ' ' | cut -d' ' -f3-

In zsh and ksh:

history -n

In tcsh:

history -h

Edit

Also see rush's answer about using fc.

Answer 4

An alternative solution is to use the terminal's block select method, if it has it available. Usually you simply hold Ctrl before selecting with the mouse. This will enable block select mode in many modern terminals (definitely the numerous terminals based on libvte).

Next, simply drag and release so your selection block covers all the lines (up to the full width of the longest command) you want to copy. Then you simply paste it, and newlines will be preserved.

This is a simple trick that I use many times per day when doing quick copy/pastes, to avoid things like prefixed line numbers, timestamps in logfiles, etc.

Note that this will not work if one of the copied commands spans more than one line!