Cygwin shortcut for command history

Question

How can I search the command history in cygwin?

I don't want to keep pressing the arrow keys to execute a command from console command history.

Answer 1

I think one of the easiest way is to pipeline it with less and press search character ("/") and then type the command you wanna find.

history | less

and then

/text to find

to find the desired command

Another way

is to append the stdout form history command to a file: history > /cygdrive/path/file.txt

and then search in the document.

Answer 2

If you are using the default editing mode, do ctrl+R to search back through your history.

If you have done set -o vi to use vi editing mode, then it is esc-/

Answer 3

The history command is the way to go. I use

h ()
{
    history | cut -f 2- | sort -u | grep -P --color=auto -e "$*"
}

so that I can type something like h git.*MyProgram, h ^tar -c, h svn:ignore, etc to pull up a sorted list of past commands matching a regex.

You might also want to add the following lines to ~/.inputrc:

# Ctrl+Up/Down for searching command history
"\e[1;5A": history-search-backward
"\e[1;5B": history-search-forward

With these in place, you can type a partial command prefix (such as gi or sql) then use Ctrl+Up to scroll back through the list of just your command history entries that match that prefix (such as git clone https://code.google.com/p/double-conversion/ and sqlite3 .svn/wc.db .tables). This can be a lot faster than searching and then cutting and pasting if you want to edit or re-execute a command that was fairly recent.

Answer 4

I use the history command in combination with grep, e.g. history | grep vi shows all commands where vi was used.