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History and man-pages Basics of Bash

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Important notes

You can also press Ctrl+r and start typing a command you're looking for. You'll get an autocomplete of your past commands. Keep entering symbols and you'll get closer and closer to the thing you're looking for.

Press Ctrl+r to go to the previous occurence of the matching line

You can "tag" lines with # to find it easier later. E.g.:

ls -la  | grep doc | sort -r | wc #report

and then

Ctrl+r #report

You'll quickly come back to the original line. # creates a comment, and everything after # is ignored, but stays in history.

Lesson notes

  • and to go to previous/next line in history
  • history to view history
  • !N to repeat a line from history, where N is a number (e.g. !32)
  • !! to repeat the previous command
    • can also be used with other commands, e.g. !! | grep Doc will repeat the previous command and pipe it with grep Doc
  • man to open man-page (help page) (e.g. man wc to open man-page for wc command)
    • opens inside a pager, so same navigation with j, k etc. works.

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