[ Thanks to Amy
Bennett for this link. ]
“Whether you page back through your history with
repetitions of up arrow presses or reuse commands by typing an
exclamation point followed by the first few letters of the
previously entered command, you can work faster and feel less
annoyed by these useful time saving features of the Unix shell.“Bash, however, has a feature called “history mode” that takes
your reuse of previously entered commands to new heights. You enter
history mode by typing ^r (hold control key and press the letter
“r”). You will see something like this:(reverse-i-search)`’: