Tag Archives: Control + R

Control + R in Bash = Life Changed

I’m probably late to the party on this one.

I was working with someone the other day on a problem over a video call and sharing my screen on a Linux box.

They watched as I did what I do often and Grep’ed through my command history to find a command I’d run before but couldn’t remember the specifics of off the top of my head.

Something like this:

How I’ve always found commands from my history

Then the person I was working with told me to try pressing Control + R and typing the start of what I was looking for.

My head exploded.

Searching through Bash command history

From here you can search through your command history and scroll between matching entries,

I cannot believe it’s taken me this long to learn!

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