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Comment by scarecrowbob | Hacker News Reader

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scarecrowbob

here's an example of the first useful grep I learned :

history | grep "git push"

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Just use Ctrl-R in bash to search backwards in the history

I didn't know you could do that, so it's good to have an option- thanks.

But how do you then pipe that to tail? :D

You don't, it's a readline thing, it doesn't really generate a file you can manipulate. (I expect to be proven wrong with some insane one-liner though).

What you can do is press Ctrl-R again and it will search the older match. There's also forward match but I can't recall the shortcut.

I alias "history | grep" to "hrep" and I'd bet it is one of my top 3-5 commands.

Why not find out:

  history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head

:D HA! Nice!

2936 git 1166 cd 409 ll 343 ssh 302 l 279 vagrant 223 ls 201 la 151 cat 140 mkdir

uniq seems a bit easier to understand here:

history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

Why not use C-r?

This could change your life:

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

It's a fuzzy searcher for Ctrl-r that shows all possible results, updating as you type.

Sometimes that is what I want, but usually I want a list of all the iterations of something to cut/paste/adjust.

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