How to start first command from the list printed by command 'history | grep something'

Question

For example, I have the following output from command:

loom@loom:$ history | grep MAKE
  219  ../build.sh -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..
  909  history | grep MAKE

How to write a command, that start the first command from the list? Also, I'd like to know how to start n-th command from output of history | grep something?

Answer 1

See those numbers on the left of the output? You can use them to refer to that command with shell history expansion; ![number] in most shells.

This works both in bash and zsh:

$ echo "hello"
hello
$ history | grep hello
 5057  echo "hello"
$ !5057
echo "hello"
hello
$

Answer 2

Not a very elegant solution but works.

i=5  # Execute 5th command from the beginning of history
`history | sed -n "${i}p" | sed 's/^.\{7\}//'`

Answer 3

the following little bash-function should do what you want in many cases.

usage: nthhist 3 MAKE will run the 3rd command that contained MAKE.

note: this won't work if the command found this way is only a bash-internal

nthhist() {
  local NTH
  NTH=$1
  shift
  history \
  | grep -v "nthhist" \
  | grep "$@" \
  | head -${NTH} | tail -1 \
  | while read id cmd
  do
    $cmd
  done
}