Anybody who has used the command line extensively to navigate, understand and configure GNU/Linux will know that in the course of a few months’ work it is possible to build up an extensive history of used commands. This necessitates some pro-active management to get the best out of it. Here are some tips to make the most of the history command.

The bash shell maintains a history of the commands you entered. You can re-execute a command by recalling it from the history, without having to re-type it.

The Mozilla project has a long and distinguished history of holding global distributed parties to celebrate major events in the project's life, including at the South Pole. I'm pleased to say that we are doing this again - mozillaparty.com is now open for business

If you're like me and work for a company who has many linux admins all logging into servers and then su'ing to root, you may find this tip beneficial. It is simply 3 lines that you add to root's .bash_profile which will keep separate history files for each admin that su's to root and the commands they ran. It will allow you to go back and see what the user did as root.

Sometimes events transpire in the software industry that, when tied with other events, take on a much bigger meaning. Such is the case with three different announcements in the last ten days. The first two got a good bit of press; the last didn't. Let's see how they connect.

It has become a classic and recurrent routine which continues to be seen once every few weeks. Microsoft offers some organisers money in exchange for the right to attend and speak out its mind in open source events, even Linux events thanks to Novell’s implicit invitation

Here's some charts I've stumbled across giving a detailed explanation of the history of Unix and Linux.

One of the most important recent events in the world of free software has been the release of version 3 of the GNU GPL. There were fierce arguments about its utility while it was being drawn up, and although the rhetoric has abated somewhat, there is still a big question mark over its eventual success.

I reckon we should go into a brief, “Readers Digest” version of the history of Linux. Linux as we know it was developed in 1991 by Linux Torvalds based upon the GNU code written by, or at least announced by, Richard Stallman in 1983. Just knowing that dispels the myth that Linux is based upon Unix as GNU stands for “Gnu is Not Unix.” This often leads to the use of the term GNU/LINUX.