Appendix J. History Commands

The Bash shell provides command-line tools for editing andmanipulating a user's command history. Thisis primarily a convenience, a means of saving keystrokes.

Bash history commands:

1. history
2. fc

bash$ 

history

   1  mount /mnt/cdrom
   2  cd /mnt/cdrom
   3  ls
   ...  

Internal variables associated with Bash history commands:

1. $HISTCMD
2. $HISTCONTROL
3. $HISTIGNORE
4. $HISTFILE
5. $HISTFILESIZE
6. $HISTSIZE
7. $HISTTIMEFORMAT (Bash, ver. 3.0 or later)
8. !!
9. !$
10. !#
11. !N
12. !-N
13. !STRING
14. !?STRING?
15. ^STRING^string^

Unfortunately, the Bash history tools find no use in scripting.

   1 #!/bin/bash
   2 # history.sh
   3 # Attempt to use 'history' command in a script.
   4
   5 history
   6
   7 # Script produces no output.
   8 # History commands do not work within a script.

bash$ 
./history.sh
(no output)

The Advancing in theBash Shellsite gives a good introduction to the use ofhistory commands in Bash.