L. History Commands (Revision #1)

The Bash shell provides command-line tools for editing and manipulating a user's command history. This is primarily a convenience, a means of saving keystrokes.

Bash history commands:

history

fc

bash$ history
1  mount /mnt/cdrom
2  cd /mnt/cdrom
3  ls
...


Internal variables associated with Bash history commands:

$HISTCMD

$HISTCONTROL

$HISTIGNORE

$HISTFILE

$HISTFILESIZE

$HISTSIZE

$HISTTIMEFORMAT (Bash, ver. 3.0 or later)

!!

!$

!#

!N

!-N

!STRING

!?STRING?

^STRING^string^

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

#!/bin/bash
# history.sh
# A (vain) attempt to use the 'history' command in a script.

history                      # No output.

var=$(history); echo "$var"  # $var is empty.

# History commands disabled within a script.

bash$ ./history.sh
(no output)          


The Advancing in the Bash Shell site gives a good introduction to the use of history commands in Bash.