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| Bash History |
History
history with no arguments prints a chronological list of command line input to standard out, each preceded with a sequential numerical identifier.
You can pass a single numerical argument, e.g. history 10, which will show only the last n commands.
! is known as the history expansion. It enables selection of specific historical commands. For example, !5 will reproduce the fifth command from the beginning.
! can be followed with a string as well, e.g. !cd. This will reproduce the last command beginning with that string.
A common use case for history is to recall and repeat a previous used sequence of commands (workflow). This process can be made more convenient by redirecting the output of history to the grep command using a | (pipe). (In it's simplest usage, grep takes a single string argument and filters out lines of the command's input that do not contain the string.) For example, history | grep cd will output a list of all uses of the cd command (plus any other command that happened to include that string).
More information
- gnu.org (online manual page)
- rootusers.com (common usage examples)