Question

Scenario:

You are doing your daily Bash shell stuff. You want to run a previous command so you type:

history | grep foocommand 

Then you get a list of all the foocommand stuff you did for however long your history has kept track, in a list like so:

  585 foocommand --baz --bleet   750 foocommand | grep quux   987 history grep | foocommand 

You decide you want to run command 585, so you type

  !585 

Question: Just for curiosity, is there a way to take that final step out of the equation and still get the expected outcome? It would be nice if there were a way to say:

 'grep through history and automatically run the first item on the list' 

or

'grep through history and let me choose which item to run using the arrow keys' 

Answer 1

The syntax

!foo 

will run the last command that began with foo.

Failing that, bash uses the readline library for input, which supports the history-search-forward and history-search-backward commands that can be bound to keys of your choice. I’ve edited my ./inputrc file to bind them to F8 and Shift-F8, so that they work like Windows’ equivalent feature in the console when I connect with PuTTY:

'\e[19~':history-search-backward '\e[32~':history-search-forward