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In most Unix shells, the arrow-up ↑ key replaces the command that is being edited by the previous command in the history. The history can be seen using the command history.

↑ can be pressed more than one time to climb up in the history.

My question is:

How can I configure my shell so that ↑ skips all commands identical to the current one?

Indeed I often enter many make in a row. When I want to enter again (or modify slightly) an older command I have to hit ↑ many times just to skip all the make commands.

I know that ↑ is far from being the only tip that increase shell productivity.

bonus:

  • give a configuration working for the Bash shell.
  • preserve the history (knowing that you typed a command many times in a row can be useful)

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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For zsh put this in your configuration:

setopt histignoredups

What it does, it will ignore duplicated history entries during search.

The equivalent setting for bash is

HISTCONTROL=$HISTCONTROL:ignoredups
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  • 1
    thanks, setopt histignoredups does the job but also suppress duplicate from the history
    – Gabriel Devillers
    Sep 20, 2016 at 21:27
  • Yes, exactly. In most cases this is what you want. When you have seen a suggestion and you don't want it, you don't want to have this suggested again. It does not delete duplicates from history, btw.
    – Martin Sugioarto
    Sep 21, 2016 at 5:58
  • You are right but I meant: future duplicates will not be added to the history.
    – Gabriel Devillers
    Sep 21, 2016 at 6:03
  • They are added otherwise the other option called histexpiredupsfirst that I also use would not make sense. It makes duplicates expire first before looking at the age. (I am talking about zsh here)
    – Martin Sugioarto
    Sep 21, 2016 at 6:21

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