How to display a list of recent commands in Ubuntu Linux

Linux has a rich command line experience that can sometimes be a little daunting for people switching over from Windows. Displaying the list of recent commands is pretty simple, though:

> history

1 ps -ef
2 kill 24188
3 ps -ef
4 tail logfile.log

If you want to find a command that you used before but you have a huge history list, you can quickly find it by passing it through grep. Let’s say we remember typing the ftp command, but can’t remember the domain name of the server:

> history | grep ftp

321 ftp ftp.cdrom18.com

Pretty simple stuff! What if we want to display the list of items that we use the most often?  We can use a much more complicated command like this:

> history|awk ‘{print $2}’|awk ‘BEGIN {FS=”|”} {print $1}’|sort|uniq -c|sort -r

114 ls
105 ./runreports.sh
97 cd
24 uptime
15 mysql
13 vi

The last command was thanks to Lifehacker, which is a great site you should definitely subscribe to.

The techniques used in the last command are useful in other contexts. I’ll be posting more similar commands going forwards.