For anyone who's not familiar with something as basic as the history command, please pick up a book on bash/zsh/sh and take the time to learn.
If you don't know how to use the shell, you will struggle with (or simply be unable to perform) many basic tasks that could be accomplished quickly and easily by someone who's taken the time to learn how to use the shell and a handful of basic tools like grep, sed, awk, etc.
Shells are large programs. Everyone is unfamiliar with some bits because it just doesn't fit in their workflow.
Imagine how you'd rush to justify your lack of it here.
Everything you'd say in your defense would equally explain why someone wouldn't know the meaning of a certain unmarked number in the output of a random shell command.
I've seen myself transition. I've read python 2 stdlib docs cover to cover, and was better for it. It was also the last language for which I did that. I skimmed kotlin stdlib, and with go these days I hit up a search engine.
If everyone spent time going through every supposedly basic thing first, nobody would get anything done.
It's not at all obvious that the number is the history entry number, and I'm not even sure if knowing that brings any value to the average user.
I don't bother reading entire manuals either, but I know where they are. And if I'm using something often, I also try to learn how to best get help and information. Knowledge of the shell isn't mandatory, but can help greatly sometimes. If someone implement a feature to scratch an itch, it's nice to know about it when the same thing frustrates you too.
> If everyone spent time going through every supposedly basic thing first, nobody would get anything done.
I’m not convinced that’d be so bad. We could all strive to do less. There’s too much bullshit “doing” in the world and not enough thoughtful pondering on what should be done.
If everyone spent the time to go through basic things, and thus had less time to do new things, then there would be fewer things to go through. And every new thing would be informed by what came before and not repeat its mistakes. And they would have had more thought put into it, thus be less buggy and dysfunctional, thus necessitating fewer alternatives.
It’s not going to happen, but everyone doing less and taking the time to learn the basics would likely make the world better.
Some features just aren't worth the time.
> history | get 81201
╭─────────────────┬─────────────────────────────╮
│ start_timestamp │ 2025-03-26 05:16:58.184 UTC │
│ command │ echo hello world │
│ cwd │ /Users/matt │
│ duration │ 1ms │
│ exit_status │ 0 │
╰─────────────────┴─────────────────────────────╯
Or even just the man page! bash(1)'s man page is a treasure trove, and it's a fairly short read (versus an entire book, at least).
man bash