How to browse bash history between certain line numbers

Question

Everytime I need this I google it like 10 minutes. I don't know how to express this better so that Google finds it right away but I need to retrieve bash history between certain lines like:

$ history --start 321 --end 456
#to retrieve history from 321 and to 456

Answer 1

You can use something like

history | grep -A 135 -w 321

It starts with line 321 and shows the next 135 lines, so it will show lines 321 to 456.

Answer 2

Use head and tail:

history | head -n 456 | tail -n 136

Which will get the first 456 (up to the end you want) and then you get the last 136 (which computes as 456 - 136 = 320, but will fetch from the 321st record from history).

Answer 3

I assume you mean command numbers and not line numbers. I would use sed to give me the lines in the file between the two command numbers.

$ history | sed -n '/^ 321 /,/^ 456 /p'

^ character matches at the start of the line. Also a space after the number to make sure ^ 321 doesn't match line equalling 32155 ls

Answer 4

The solution below strives for the least dependencies, least mathematical calculation, maximal readability(tested under GNU grep):

# Display history lines exactly from line321 to line456
history | grep -A $((456-321)) '321\ \ '

# Or throw away 'Space Escaping', a even 
# more simple command we'd get , but the output 
# will contain one more line, which is this command itself.
history | grep -A $((456-321)) '321  '

with output:

321 some-command
322 some-command
...
...
...
456 some-command