Using Shell History
Most Command Line Shells have a built-in feature to record
commands you've run. This is handy for two reasons: it keeps a record of
what you've done, and it makes it super easy to repeat commands without
retyping them. (Your shell remembers that gnarly find command so you don't have to. 🧠) We'll focus on BASH here, since it's the most common shell in enterprise Linux.
To see your command history, just type:
These commands are stored in your ~/.bash_history file.
The size of your history is controlled by two environment variables:
HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE. Where these are set depends on your Linux
distribution. On RHEL-family systems, /etc/profile sets a default
HISTSIZE of 1,000. On Debian-based systems, each user inherits a
HISTFILESIZE of 2,000 and a HISTSIZE of 1,000 from
/etc/skel/.bashrc.
If you want to keep more (or fewer) commands in your history, you can
change these values in your own ~/.bashrc file.