Appendix F. History Commands

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. !!

  8. !$

  9. !#

  10. !N

  11. !-N

  12. !STRING

  13. !?STRING?

  14. ^STRING^string^

Unfortunately, the Bash history tools find no use in scripting.
   1 #!/bin/bash
   2 # history.sh
   3 # Attempt to use 'history' command in a script.
   4 
   5 history
   6 
   7 # Script produces no output.
   8 # History commands do not work within a script.

 bash$ ./history.sh
 (no output)