History search Completion using PageUp/Down in Bash

The Bash-shell stores a history of your last commands. Entering history will display all recently used commands identifying them by an id which lets you access them by entering ![id]. This is a nice feature, but unhandy: you can’t easily edit the command before being executed and furthermore to find the appropriate id you have to look through the whole list or use grep.

Bash offers a feature which could be called history search auto completion. Just enter the first letters of the command and use [PageUp] and [PageDown] to browse through recently used commands matching exactly the part you already entered.

To do so create/edit the file .inputrc in your home folder and insert the following two lines. Alternatively you could edit the /etc/inputrc which would let the changes effect in global scope.

"e[5~": history-search-backward
"e[6~": history-search-forward

Cheers
Simon