in BASH when enabled you can use the up arrow keys to view your previously entered commands, and also BASH and other shells have an auto-complete featue, in bach you just hit tab and it will either complete your command or give you a list of commands. i like bash's features better than DOSKEY when i used DOS.

my shell is csh
i did a set and got the below

histfile /home/adm/.history
history 100

i did a ls -ltr /home/adm/.history but it was empty.

what else do i need to set?

Read the man page for csh - search for savehist.

Set your history in your .login in your home directory.

set history=200

logout and log back in (or start a new session) - type history at the prompt. Do a couple of commands and try the history command again. See if it's changed.

As far as what you wanted to do:
History can be done in csh but not in sh. You won't be able to use Esc - or anything else in csh to list commands unless you change the history subsitution characters. Again, read the man page on csh and look for histchars.

I did not find "histfile" anywhere and if set, does not do a thing.
Try the savehist which can be found in the csh man page. Then you should see your .history start to grow (if you set it correctly).

Just an FYI to above, bash can do either history type, as can some vrsions of ksh.

bash default is the same as entering "set -o emacs".
You can get the vi editing mode on bash by entering "set -o vi".

The most flexible shell of all wrt user input/command recall and much more besides is zsh.

i did a man csh, but did not read/find any savehist at all.
please advise.

the set history=200 in .login works.. but now i hoped to get it to write
to a file.

set history=200
set histfile=$HOME/.history
set savehist=200 merge


put the above in .login and it will work!

cheers....


okay, will try to achieve the same for sh...