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. 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.