Into.the.Void.

Debian is one of the few distros that you can’t search the bash history backward or forward for past commands by default.
To change that behaviour you need to uncomment two lines inside /etc/inputrc.

Change:

# alternate mappings for "page up" and "page down" to search the history
# "\e[5~": history-search-backward
# "\e[6~": history-search-forward

To:

# alternate mappings for "page up" and "page down" to search the history
"\e[5~": history-search-backward
"\e[6~": history-search-forward


Example usage:
To search through your old commands that started with “ssh” (e.g. ssh -p 551 koko@lala.gr, ssh foo@bar.gr, ssh test@koko.gr -L1111:1.2.3.4:9876), just type ssh and hit PgUp, you will see the previous ssh commands appearing on the command line.
$ ssh[PgUp] transforms to $ ssh -p 551 koko@lala.gr hit PgUp again and it transforms to
$ ssh foo@bar.gr PgUp and it becomes $ ssh test@koko.gr -L1111:1.2.3.4:9876

Filed by kargig at 12:06 under Linux
6 Comments | 8,920 views