CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshellzsh
fschulze
fschulze

Reputation: 81

Shell "sub search" with ctrl-r

Is there a way to do a "sub search" with ctrl-r. Say I want to search for "find" and then search in the results for something else. The search doesn't seem to be a regular expression in zsh at least, so something like "find.*foo" doesn't work.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 520

Answers (2)

user4815162342
user4815162342

Reputation: 154911

In zsh you can use ESC x history-incremental-pattern-search-backward to search history for a pattern. Unfortunately the pattern is a glob-style pattern, not a regular expression.

Most terminal emulators will allow the use of Alt-X instead of ESC x.

Upvotes: 1

Dario
Dario

Reputation: 2713

I’m answering about bash.

Neither reverse-search-history (the function bound to Ctrl-r), nor history expansion (by which you can re-invoke the last find command typing !ls, or print it typing !ls:p) support globbing or regexes.

Your best option is 

history | grep 'find.*foo'

to look for the regex 'find.*foo' in the the command history (you can also give, say, history 20, to restrict the search to the last 20 commands in history).

Upvotes: 1

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