Search commands in history with discontinuous keywords

Question

I was wondering how to  search commands in history without knowing the first few letters of the command?
When searching using Ctrl+R in bash, one has to give the first few letters of the command. What if I only know some characters in the middle, or some at the beginning and some in the middle?
For example, to search cat myfile, I only know there is at in it, or c at the beginning and my in the middle somewhere. keywords have to be continuously positioned. For example, in cat myfile, I would like to search for bothc and my, but Ctrl+R will not allow to specify both simultaneously.

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' · Answer

Bash only has a simple string search, as far as I can see.

Consider switching to zsh, which has a history wildcard search. history-incremental-pattern-search-backward and history-incremental-pattern-search-forward aren't bound to keys by default, but you can bind them:

bindkey '^X^R' history-incremental-pattern-search-backward
bindkey '^X^S' history-incremental-pattern-search-forward

Then type Ctrl+X Ctrl+R ^c*my.

baweaver · Answer

Apropos(1) should also return a man for the subject if the man contains that word. Whatis(1) returns only absolute matches.

For reference:
Apropos == man -k
Whatis == man -f

These two should be a great help, along with wildcards * and ?

jasonwryan · Answer

If you are just looking to find the line (to jog your memory) you could just grep for the part of the command you remember:

history | grep "substring"

Search commands in history with discontinuous keywords

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