Question

In Matlab, there is a very nice feature that I like. Suppose I typed the command very-long-command and then a few several commands afterwards. Then later if I need the long command again, I just type very and press the up arrow key, my long command appears. It finds the last command that starts with very. I couldn’t do the same in unix command line, when I try to do it, it disregards whatever I typed, and goes back to the last commands in chronological order. Is there a way to do it?

Answer 1

In bash, hitting ctrl–r will let you do a history search:

$ echo 'something very long'
something very long
$ # blah
$ # many commands later...
(reverse-i-search)`ec': echo 'something very long'

In the above snippet, I hit ctrl–r on the next line after # many commands later..., and then typed ec which brought me back to the echo command. At that point hitting Enter will execute the command.