Press the up and down cursor keys to move through the commands you entered previously and hit Enter when you find the one you want.

What you're actually looking at is the line-by-line contents of your ~/.bash_history file. All the commands you entered during a session will be appended to this file each time you log out.

Enter the following commands one by one:

ls -a
ls -l
ls --color
history 4

See how that last command displayed the last 4 history entries:

  493  ls -a
  494  ls -l
  495  ls --color
  496  history 4

- 2 -

Enter:

!ls

...to re-enter the last command that that begun with ls (in this case ls --color). Note that !l would have worked just as well in this instance.

Entering history on its own will display every entry in your command history. If the command you're looking for has scrolled out of view, just enter:

history | less

...then find what you're looking for, and press q to quit the less program.

Notice how every entry is assigned an ID number. To re-enter command 494, you would enter:

!494

find -name budget98.txt

...to find where in your current directory the budget98.txt is located.

To re-issue the above command, but this time replace the 98 with 99 (to look for budget99.txt), enter:

^98^99

Clever, yes?