Charly's Column – Shell History » Linux Magazine
Author(s): Charly Khünast For admins like Charly, who try to avoid typing at all costs, the shell offers an excellent opportunity to avoid wear on your fingertips in the form of built-in history. There are commands that I type several dozen times a day – grep /var/log/syslog is such a classic. The shell keeps a history of all my entries; thanks to the history command, I can always see in a numbered list which commands I typed last. The which history at the command line just drops you into a black hole. Instead, history is a part of the shell, a built-in keyword.