history — Display a command history list

Format

history [first[last]]

tcsh shell:

history [-hTr] [n]

history -S|-L|-M [filename]

history -c

Description

history is an alias for fc –l. Like fc –l, history displays the list of commands that have been input to an interactive shell. This command does not edit or reenter the commands. If you omit last, history displays all commands from the one indicated by first through to the previous command entered. If you omit both first and last with this command, the default command range is the 16 most recently entered commands.

See fc — Process a command history list for more information.

For the tcsh shell, history, when used alone, prints the history event list. If n is given only the n most recent events are printed or saved.

Note: See tcsh — Invoke a C shell for descriptions of the tcsh shell variables and commands.

The tcsh shell history built-in command uses the following options:

With -h, the history list is printed without leading numbers.
With -T, timestamps are printed also in comment form. (This can be used to produce files suitable for loading with history -L or source -h.)
With -r, the order of printing is most recent first rather than oldest first.
With -S, history saves the history list to filename. If the first word of the savehist shell variable is set to a number, at most that many lines are saved. If the second word of savehist is set to merge, the history list is merged with the existing history file instead of replacing it (if there is one) and sorted by time stamp. Merging is intended for an environment like the X Window System with several shells in simultaneous use. Currently it only succeeds when the shells quit one after another.
With -L, the shell appends filename, which is presumably a history list saved by the -S option or the savehist mechanism, to the history list. -M is like -L, but the contents of filename are merged into the history list and sorted by timestamp. In either case, histfile is used if filename is not given and ~/.history is used if histfile is unset. history -L is exactly like source -h except that it does not require a filename.
With -c, clears the history list.

tcsh login shells do the equivalent of history -L on startup and, if savehist is set, history -S before exiting. Because only ~/.tcshrc is normally sourced before ~/.history, histfile should be set in ~/.tcshrc rather than ~/.login. If histlit is set, the first form (history [-hTr] [n]) and second form (history -S|-L|-M [filename]) print and save the literal (unexpanded) form of the history list.

Related information

fc, sh, tcsh