If you're like me and use the Terminal in OS X on a daily basis, you probably also use the 'history' command quite regularly too. Every time I use history I always pipe it through grep, so always, always end up typing 'history|grep blah', now isn't there an easier way? Well there is, and that's what the alias functionality is for.

I used the alias command in my ~/.profile file to set up a new command alias called 'ghist' that will run the output of history through grep, this is set up like so:


With that set, all I have to do now is type 'ghist blah' to look through my history for anything I ran that included the text blah in it. Simple really and quite useful.




Of course this same trick will work in pretty much any other flavour of Unix.

-i