Command history is a feature in many operating system shells, computer algebra programs, and other

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

that allows the user to recall, edit and rerun previous commands. Command line history was added to

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

Bill Joy William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at ...

C shell The C shell (csh or the improved version, tcsh) is a Unix shell created by Bill Joy while he was a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. It has been widely distributed, beginning with the 2BSD release of the ...

of 1978; Joy took inspiration from an earlier implementation in

Interlisp Interlisp (also seen with a variety of capitalizations) is a programming environment built around a version of the programming language Lisp. Interlisp development began in 1966 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (renamed BBN Technologies) in Cambridge, ...

. It quickly became popular because it made the C shell fast and easy to use. History has since become a standard feature in other shells, including ksh,

Bash Bash or BASH may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''Bash!'' (Rockapella album), 1992 * ''Bash!'' (Dave Bailey album), 1961 * '' Bash: Latter-Day Plays'', a dramatic triptych * ''BASH!'' (role-playing game), a 2005 superhero game * "Bash" ('' ...

and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

cmd.exe Command Prompt, also known as cmd.exe or cmd, is the default command-line interpreter for the OS/2, eComStation, ArcaOS, Microsoft Windows (Windows NT family and Windows CE family), and ReactOS operating systems. On Windows CE .NET 4.2, Windo ...

. History addressed two important scenarios: # Executing the same command or a short sequence of commands over and over. An example might be a developer frequently compiling and running a program. # Correcting mistakes or rerunning a command with only a small modification. In Joy's original C shell, the user could refer to a previous command by typing an exclamation, !, followed by additional characters to specify a particular command, only certain words, or to edit it in some way before pasting it back into the command line. For example: :!! meant the entire previous command. :!$ meant just the last word of the previous command. :!''abc'' meant the command that started with ''abc''. The usual implementation today is to combine history with command-line editing. The cursor keys are used to navigate up and down through the history list and left or right to anyplace on the line, where the user can simply type a desired change. But some implementations are

menu In a restaurant, the menu is a list of food and beverages offered to customers and the prices. A menu may be à la carte – which presents a list of options from which customers choose – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-established seque ...

-based: The user presses a certain function key which displays a menu of recent commands, which the user can select one by typing a number. Some implementation such as

support to record command history to a file (history command).

References

{{Reflist User interfaces

See also

References