mjhjmtu

I often find myself searching in my history by doing something like

history | grep searchterm

This returns a list of all the times that I used searchterm in a command. However, I would often like to know the n previous commands and the m next commands that I entered before and after that command which contained searchterm. Often the context in which I ran a command is very useful.

What I would like to be able to do is

> history-search-context searchterm n m

and get separated lists of commands that were entered n commands before and m commands after any history entry that contains searchterm.

Example:

> history-search-context mycommand 2 1

687 cd some/directory
688 ls -a
689 mycommand -flag arg1
690 touch file
-------------
943 apt-get install something
944 pwd
945 mycommand -otherflag arg1 arg2 arg3
946 rm file

This would tell me that I used mycommand twice in recorded history with some interesting flags and arguments, and within a window of [-2,+1] commands I had one time run it in some/directory and had to create a file, and the other time, I installed something, checked which directory I was in, and then deleted file.

Is there an existing way to do this? If not, how to accomplish this?

I would approach it with a helper function and grep, since (GNU) grep has a natural set of options for "lines before & after the match". The bare-bones version is:

histgrep() grep -B $2 -A $3 "$1"

... and you'd use it just like your history-search-context command above:

$ histgrep jeff 1 1

 517 vi go.sh
 518 x=jeff
 519 y=/tmp
--
 832 sudo visudo
 833 sudo adduser jeff2
 834 man sudoers
--
 841 sudo ls -al /var/lib/sudo/lectured
 842 sudo rm /var/lib/sudo/lectured/jeff /var/lib/sudo/lectured/schaller
 843 sudo ls
--
 940 ls *[[:digit:]][[:digit:]][[:digit:]][[:digit:]][[:digit:]]*
 941 touch jeff߄߅߆߇߈߉.txt
 942 ls
--
 1235 histgrep a b c
 1236 histgrep jeff a 1
 1237 histgrep jeff 1 a
 1238 histgrep jeff 1 1

After adding some basic error-checking the function would be:

histgrep() grep -B $2 -A $3 "$1"

You could easily enough name it history-search-context instead of histgrep if you wanted:

history-search-context() 
# ...