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In Matlab, there is a very nice feature that I like. Suppose I typed the command very-long-command and then a few several commands afterwards. Then later if I need the long command again, I just type very and press the up arrow key, my long command appears. It finds the last command that starts with very. I couldn't do the same in unix command line, when I try to do it, it disregards whatever I typed, and goes back to the last commands in chronological order. Is there a way to do it?

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  • Matlab has good default settings. I always wonder why the Unix people can't provide good default settings for these things. Commented Jun 19, 2014 at 14:12
  • This question is similar to: How do I change bash history completion to complete what's already on the line?. If you believe it’s different, please edit the question, make it clear how it’s different and/or how the answers on that question are not helpful for your problem. Commented Dec 22, 2024 at 9:14

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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In bash this functionality is provided by the commands history-search-forward and history-search-backward, which by default are not bound to any keys (see here). If you run

bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward' bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'

it will make up-arrow and down-arrow search backward and forward through the history for the string of characters between the start of the current line and the point. See also this related Stack Overflow question.

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In bash, hitting ctrl-r will let you do a history search:

$ echo 'something very long' something very long $ # blah $ # many commands later... (reverse-i-search)`ec': echo 'something very long'

In the above snippet, I hit ctrl-r on the next line after # many commands later..., and then typed ec which brought me back to the echo command. At that point hitting Enter will execute the command.

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Thanks! I have another quick question, what if there are two recently used long commands starting with echo, how can I switch between the two with this method?
@AgCl: This blog post explains how to set up history-search-forward and history-search-backward to navigate through the history.
The above link is dead
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You can do the same thing by using "!". For example:

 $ echo "Hello" Hello $ !echo echo "Hello" Hello

However, it is generally a bad idea to do this sort of thing (what if the last command did something destructive?). If you expect you will reuse something, then I suggest you create a shell script and save it away somewhere (whenever I plan to reuse something, I create a script in ~/.local/bin).

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Thanks, it's almost as close to Matlab's, but I can't see the whole command before hitting enter. I'll upvote the answer when I have enough rep.
!echo:p will display the command (bash anyway) and you can choose to execute it or not.

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