“If you use Linux you will sooner or later be confronted
with some kind of shell. And probability is high that this shell
will be Bash ( Bourne-Again SHell). So when your when your nice X
environment crashes and it comes down to the naked console, it’s
better to know how to use bash efficiently. Some of the
commands will be a little strange at first, but they make your
shell to one of the most powerful tools you have.”
“One of the things that make your life easier is the command
history. Bash stores all of your commands used in the current
session in the memory and writes them to ~/.bash_history after you
logged out. This file contains (by default) your 500 last commands.
In case you want to cover your tracks, you can keep bash from
writing your commands to your historyfile by typing “unset
HISTFILE” at the beginning of your session. You can use the up-key
or control-p to get the previous command from the history, use the
down-key or control-n to go to the next command.”