Annyce Davis

Davis Technology Consulting

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Blog
  • Courses
  • Newsletter

Unix History Command

August 13, 2009 by Annyce Davis

In order to save myself from painstakingly typing the same commands over and over again I invested a little time in learning about the Unix history command. One workflow that I have found very useful is the following:

!vi – repeats the last vi command that I typed (apply this to any command)
!! – repeats the last command that I typed

history – prints out the entire history with the associated number for each command
example:
100 – vi info.txt
101 – mv info.txt noinfo.txt

history > myhistory.txt – this will store the contents of my history in a file for later reference

Using the information derived from history I can then do the following:
!100 – this will perform the command vi info.txt
more !:$ – this will take the first argument of the last command and perform a new command on it. So in this instance I will essentially have more info.txt.

Amazing stuff, hunh!

Share this:

  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon
  • Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky
  • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) WhatsApp
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit

Related

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Command Line, Unix

Follow Me

  • Bluesky

Categories

  • Android (61)
  • Career (5)
  • Communication (4)
  • Flutter (1)
  • Git (4)
  • Gradle (4)
  • Grails (23)
  • iOS (1)
  • Java (8)
  • JavaScript (6)
  • Kotlin (17)
  • Life (5)
  • Public Speaking (26)
  • Revenue (2)
  • RxJava (1)
  • Software Development (14)
  • Twitter (3)
  • Uncategorized (11)
  • Video Course (5)

Follow Me

  • Bluesky

Copyright © 2025 · All Rights Reserved · Log in