From http://vignesh.foamsnet.com
Using hash tags to organize bash history
We use hash tags all over the place in social networks. We use it extensively on Twitter and Instagram. Facebook recently launched support for hash tags as well.
So, in a way, our online life revolves around hash tags. Given that, it’s a really great thing for bash power users that # in shell means comment. I usually tend to type long commands and won’t bother remembering or saving them somewhere as it is in the bash history and i can retrieve it by reverse-i-search (Ctrl+R) anytime I want.
As time passes by, more than often I end up retyping the whole command as reverse-i-search doesn’t have a unique combination of letters/words to search for. So, off late, I have found a dead simple way to never lose control over reverse-i-search because of too many similar commands. I just append a hash tag every command I type in. And later search for the hash tag in reverse-i-search. Since, anything that follows # is treated as a comment, the text is silently ignored, while giving you power to search through it alter on.
For example, when i write PHP code, I often tend to run lint on all the php files before executing them to make sure there aren’t any silly syntax errors. This is the exact command that i run:
find . -iname '*.php' -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 php -l
If you look at this command, none if its contents are unique by any mean. All these phrases and commands are something that we use over and over again. So it’s very plausible that this might get lost in the bash history and practically un-searchable with reverse-i-search. Now this is the command with a hash tag appended:
find . -iname '*.php' -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 php -l #phplint
Tada, there we go. From now on, we can do a reverse-i-search for “#phplint” or merely “phplint” to get back this command from the bash history. Also make sure you set HISTSIZE to a large value in your .bashrc to make sure you history is practically infinite.
