L. History Commands (Revision #3)

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:

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.

#!/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.