Already wanted this feature for ages, now finally discovered how you can get it to work in bash. Let's say you have the typed following history in bash info gcc make vi main.c make vi Makefile Now you want to issue another "info gcc". You could press the up arrow four times but if you bind the <up arrow> to "history-search-backward" instead of "previous-history" you can type the first characters of the line you want to repeat and then push the <up arrow>. In this case you would type i <up arrow> and bash already presents you with the "info gcc" line. "history-search-backward" and "history-search-forward" only show you the history entries which match with the character you already typed. If you do not type anything it just works like the normal history. To get this behaviour always add the following two lines to your /etc/inputrc "\M-[A":history-search-backward "\M-[B":history-search-forward Have fun with it Jaap
