Searching bash history when it’s in multiple files

by  on  in Geek

When I look for previous commands that I have ran in bash, I use history | grep COMMAND. That works well when you’re history is in one file, but I now save my history in multiple files from each shell and my simple command doesn’t work.

With my history files saved in ~/.bash_history_log/ I needed a different solution. The one I came up with is grep -ri COMMAND ~/.bash_history_log/*. That seems awfully long, lets make it shorter. You can’t pass arguments to bash aliases, but you can to functions. In .bash_profile (or .bashrc, which ever runs for you by default) I added the following function:

function searchhistory() {
    grep -ri "${1}" ~/.bash_history_log/*
}
alias shistory=searchhistory

And now a simple shistory COMMAND is all it takes to find that command I ran a long time ago.