I do this too, but you know what is an even cooler and more rewarding way to exploit the shell history?
By COMMENTING your commands:
$ grep -i myname /etc/passwd # passgrep
..
..
$ Ctrl-R "passgr"
It is so rewarding to do some intense bash work with liberal command line comments and then come back a few weeks later, "history | grep \#", and see my work notes - along with the relevant commands - available.
I used to write '~/bin' scripts for special stuff, including comments in the .sh source itself - but now it just makes more sense to wang a comment at the end of the complex/interesting commands and then just grep for the comment later ..
I have a similar system but take advantage of prefix-search rather than Ctrl+r
For commands that I reuse semi-frequently I set an environment variable so that I can easily find them with prefix searching. So for example I sometimes pin IPFS paths to Infura so I have this command in my history. I can then type pin=<Up> and recall that command (until it drops off the end of my shell history).
pin= r curl -fiXPOST "https://ipfs.infura.io:5001/api/v0/pin/add?recursive=true&arg=$(c)"
I know this command doesn't depend on a lowercase `pin` variable so there is no danger. Note that this doesn't change the variable in the shell, just the executed command.
IDK, environment variables get set all of the time, I rarely worry about them breaking programs. Their job is kinda to live in the background and be passed through programs so it doesn't feel like much danger. Especially when I use lowercase and almost all programs use uppercase.
But I guess everyone has a different risk level and what feels near-zero to me is meaningful to someone else.
to my .inputrc, I find it easier to use than C-r as it's some sort of autocomplete from history. But looking up commands with !number can still be very useful when you don't remember the command you need but remember when you used it (e.g. what commands you ran before and after).
What are the "\e[A" and "\e[B" do, are they key presses?
I usually do `history | grep ...` to find the command and then use it.
Non-emacs users might tend to find this surprising, but in a shell buffer you can move around with your cursor like in a text file, so after executing `history` you can search for the command as string then copy-paste it.
Yep, it binds history search to key up and key down. Start typing a command, press up or down and it will scroll through matching completions from history
By COMMENTING your commands:
$ grep -i myname /etc/passwd # passgrep
.. ..
$ Ctrl-R "passgr"
It is so rewarding to do some intense bash work with liberal command line comments and then come back a few weeks later, "history | grep \#", and see my work notes - along with the relevant commands - available.
I used to write '~/bin' scripts for special stuff, including comments in the .sh source itself - but now it just makes more sense to wang a comment at the end of the complex/interesting commands and then just grep for the comment later ..