Learn Linux Shell Scripting - Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

Running commands from the history

The final thing we find noteworthy to describe in regards to exclamation marks is interacting with the history. As you learned just a few pages ago, the history saves your commands. With the exclamation mark, you can quickly run commands from your history: either by supplying the number of the command (for example, !100) or by entering part of the command (for example: !ls). In our experience, these functions are not used as much as the reverse search we'll explain shortly, but it is still good to be aware of this functionality.

Let's take a look at how this looks in practice:

reader@ubuntu:~$ history | grep 100 1100  date 2033  history | grep 100reader@ubuntu:~$ !1100dateSat Dec 22 19:27:55 UTC 2018reader@ubuntu:~$ ...