TIL: awk with `history`

2023-02-01

Here’s a handy one-liner with awk to get a clean history of commands on a machine:

history | awk '{$1="";$2="";$3="";print $0}' | sed -E 's/^[ ]+//'

The trick I learned is that you can just set $1 and friends to an empty string to effectively skip fields.