The most time-consuming tasks are those that require you to enter multiple commands. To view the previous command, keep pressing the ‘Up’ key and if you get carried away and scroll past the command in question, then you can move “forward” in your Mac’s Terminal history, by pressing the ‘Down’ key. One solution is to browse through your Terminal history using your Mac’s ‘Up/Down’ arrows, bringing up each command in turn, until you find the command you were looking for. If you can’t remember anything about the command, then how are you going to search for it?

Sometimes, you might know that you performed a certain task via the Terminal, but you have absolutely no idea about how you did it. You can exit ‘reverse-i-search’ without executing any commands, using the ‘Ctrl + G’ keyboard shortcut. For example maybe your search for “Sudo” returns sudo chflags hidden, when you were really looking for sudo mdfind “com_apple_backup_excludeItem = ‘.” If this happens, you can cycle through all the commands that match your search term, using the ‘Ctrl + r’ keyboard shortcut. It’s possible that the Terminal may display a command that matches part of your search term, but isn’t the command you were looking for. Once it’s displaying the correct command, you can press the ‘Enter’ key on your keyboard to execute that command. As you type, Terminal will offer different suggestions.Start typing the command you want to search for. The Terminal should now update to display the ‘reverse-i-search’ command.Press the ‘Control + r’ keys on your keyboard.The quickest way to search your Terminal history, is with a ‘reverse-i-search’ command: In this article I’m going to show you how to run long, complex commands with ease, by searching your Terminal history. Assuming that you’ve ran this command at least once before, you can re-run the command by finding it in your Terminal’s history log, and then pressing the ‘Enter’ key on your keyboard. Sometimes it’s quicker just to cut your loses and re-type the command from scratch!īut why bother typing the command at all?īy default, every command you run is stored in your Terminal’s history. Instead of moving the cursor around the Terminal using your mouse, you’re restricted to moving it one character at a time, using your Mac’s Left/Right arrow keys. To make matters worse, if you reach the end of a command only to realise that you made a typo or spelling mistake somewhere along the way, then correcting that mistake can be a clunky process.

The Terminal is one of macOS’ most powerful utilities, but typing into the Terminal can be a time-consuming and frustrating process – especially since it’s not all that unusual for Terminal commands to stretch across multiple lines.

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