[brundolf]

I'm curious to hear what people's usecases are for retaining long shell history. For myself, I never really use it beyond the current work day (up arrow)

[nox101]

I definitely refer to months old command lines. I work on 10-15 projects ~2 are every day projects, ~6 every week projects, the rest every month or 2. I often recall commands I used on those month ago projects. I often remember the first few letters and press up arrow or I Ctrl-R for a part of the command-line I remember. I rarely have to dig out the docs to remember how to full type the line.

[zem]

for work, there are a lot of commands with complex invocations that I do not use regularly enough to bother remembering all the flags. it is really useful to just grep through my full shell history to find all the times I ran that command and just copy/paste the relevant one.

[stoniejohnson]

Yep, I do `history | grep "<whatever>"` all the time..

I should probably make it a function now that I think about it.

[_kblcuk_]

Most of the shells have built-in recursive search, why not just use that? `Ctrl + R` in bash / fish / zsh at least.

[zem]

i usually want to just see all the options at once and pick the one i want, rather than searching through them one by one

[zem]

i called my function `fh` for "full history"

[Ntrails]

I end up manually curating skeleton command lines in a text file - partly because I've never had functional full badh history

[zem]

i shared my full-history script on here a while back and someone pointed me to atuin :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32477431

[brundolf]

It may just be that I don't use the shell very much compared with other people, mostly for building and running local code