In the GNU bash shell, I can type Ctrl + R to search for a matching command previously run. E.g., if I type Ctrl + R and then "grep", it lists my last grep command, and I can hit Enter to use it.
This only gives one suggestion though. Is there any way to cycle through other previously typed matching commands?
If I understand the question correctly you should be able to cycle through alternatives by repeatedly hitting Ctrl + R.
E.g.:
grepThat searches backwards through your history. To search forward instead, use Ctrl + S, but you may need to have set: stty -ixon (either by .bash_profile or manually) prior to that to disable the XON/XOFF feature which takes over Ctrl + S. If it happens anyway, use Ctrl + Q to re-enable screen output (More details here.)
[[ $- == *i* ]] && stty -ixon to your .bashrc and then CTRL+s will work as the reverse of CTRL+r
If you feel the command will be used frequently, you could add a tag
command #useful
Then
Ctrl + R #useful
This works because # is a comment delimiter, i.e. everything that comes after the symbol is not interpreted as a command. However, it will be recorded in the history and is thus searchable.
.bash_history gets flushed after a while. You'd be more comfortable using bash aliases
Commented
Dec 11, 2020 at 13:56
You can also set up the up and down arrows to do a slightly different search by adding these lines to ~/.inputrc:
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
Instead of searching for a substring anywhere in the command (like Ctrl-r) it will search for a command starting with the text to the left of the cursor. For example, if I run these commands:
$ ls bart
$ ls fools
then type ls and press Up twice, it will show ls bart and the cursor in the same place. Compare with Ctrl-r, where it would find the ls twice in the last line, so you'd have to press it once again to find the previous line.
These approaches both have their strengths, and both of them can save a lot of time.
~/.inputrc and add those two lines.
~/.inputrc the two lines including history-search-*
Commented
Aug 16, 2016 at 7:11
There's a replacement for built-in Ctrl + R called hstr. It allows to search command history matching all search tokens at the same time (among other things), and cycle through result using arrow keys:
Here's is a demo screencast.
It can be installed on a Debian-family OS like:
add-apt-repository ppa:ultradvorka/ppa
apt-get update
apt-get install hstr
hstr --show-configuration >> ~/.bashrc
And then use Ctrl + R (after reopening the terminal).
