How to find one entry in Bash history [duplicate]

Question

When I open bash and press the up arrow I see the last command I have typed. Continues presses of the up arrow will show a series of commands typed on the past.

How do I find one specific command from that list, instead of having to press the up arrow n times?

Answer 1

Press CTRL+R and start typing. Press CTRL+R again to get the next found.

Answer 2

You can use below command to find in .bash_history file

sed -n '/commandwhichyouwanttosearch/p' bash.history

example

Suppose if you want to search for ls command in .bash_history

history | sed -n '/ls/p'

Answer 3

This one has not yet been mentioned.

!start-of-command

e.g.

echo hello
ls
!echo
#finds echo hello

Answer 4

Instead of pressing UpArrow exactly n times, you would use

!-n

in the shell.

This would invoke the history expansion facility of the bash shell and would replace the expansion with the command n steps back in history (and execute it).

Example:

$ history
    1  ls
    2  ls
    3  ls
    4  history
    5  echo hello
    6  echo good night
    7  history
$ !-3
echo hello
hello

See the "HISTORY EXPANSION" section in the bash manual.

Answer 5

history + grep (or any other text searching command)

If you want to list all history entries containing string "foo": history | grep "foo"

history - shows all commands in the history buffer

grep "foo" - searches for lines containing the string foo, and you can also use regular expressions accordingly to manual of grep.

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Reverse i-search

If you want to go back through history (like you did before with arrow keys) using ctrl+r is the way to go. Just press ctrl+r and start typing. You can press ctrl+r multiple times when the phrase is already typed and it will iterate back through matching history entries

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Fuzzy Finder

This is my personal preference. Its solution is not vanilla out of the box, but I think it deserves some credit. You can install a fuzzy finder extension for bash and it will make searching for many things much more efficient (it replaces reverse i-search so ctrl+r is being used as a shortcut for searching in history).