View and Change bash history
Always wanted to know what you have been doing via bash? Did you know bash keeps a history of that? Here is a quick way to check it and an easy way to change the history limit.
First open up a terminal by going to Applications > Accessories > Terminal (in Ubuntu) or press Alt + F2 and type in terminal. Now that you have a terminal open, let’s get down to viewing your history.
To view your history via the terminal, type:
history
This will show the whole list.
To view your history in a editor (to save for later), just type:
history -w ~/history.txt
vim ~/history.txt
What history -w ~/history.txt does is save the history to a file named history.txt on your home folder (cd ~/). The next command opens up the file for viewing in vim.
Note: For more information about history be sure to use the man pages by doing:
man history
Now to change your bash history length, just open up your .bashrc by doing so:
vim ~/.bashrc
Once open, at the top add.
export HISTFILESIZE=3000
As you can see, the limit can be changed.
Bash keeps it’s own history in a file. You can view that file as stated before, or by opening ~/.bash_history
You can search through your bash_history by piping your history file into grep like so:
history | grep "search term here"
Example:
history | grep "wget"