The curse of Linux history

The curse of the Linux shell history command strikes everyone, me included.

I’ve seen people fall into historical hell many a time…

You’re working in a shell and you need to run a command that you know you’ve run before, you know it. goddamit it, you’ve definitely run this one before. The command you want is at least 20 chars long and it’s just too much to type, so you either:

• Don’t find the command as you keep up-arrowing through your history. By the time you’re bored with the up-arrow, you’ve pressed it at least 40 times and you could have re-typed the command you were looking for in full by now, twice.
• Use CTRL+R and start to re-type your command so that the shell will find it in your history. And it doesn’t. So you type more. Still doesn’t find it. And then, as you fill out the command to find it, you’ve re-typed the whole thing anyway.