bash, or the Bourne again shell, is the default shell in most Linux distributions. The popularity of the bash shell amongst Linux and UNIX users is no accident. It has many features to enhance user-friendliness and productivity. Unfortunately, you can’t take advantage of those features unless you know they exist.

When I first started using Linux, the only bash feature I took advantage of was going back through the command history using the up arrow. I soon learned additional features by watching others and asking questions. In this article, I’d like to share some bash tricks I’ve learned over the years.

» Continue reading “Bash Tips & Tricks”

Often the command you need is in your history, how do you find it?

One simple method is to run the history command and pipe it through grep.

$ history | grep cat
110  cat /tmp/foo

You can then run the command by typing ! and the history line number:

$ !110
cat /tmp/foo

» Continue reading “Easy and safe bash history searches”