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When I connect to my VPS through terminal and I want see the previous commands I get:

$ ^[[A^[[A

(by pressing up arrow)

What is wrong with it ? How can I see unix previous commands instead ?

thanks

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3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

You are most likely using sh rather than bash or some other shell that allows command line editing. Try running bash and see what happens. If this fixes things for you then you will need to change the default shell for the account e.g.

usermod -s /bin/bash YourLogin
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@lain how can I switch shell and use the other one ? – Patrick Nov 3 '10 at 21:40
@lain great thanks – Patrick Nov 3 '10 at 21:46
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chsh also works to change the login shell. – Dennis Williamson Nov 3 '10 at 23:45
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up vote 1 down vote

There is another pitfall if you have multiple shells open on the same user account: the history finally saved in the .history file will be that of the last shell closed.

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This is true by default, but not by necessity -- see shopt -s histappend. (Note that bash won't see the history of other instances until history is reloaded, but you can stuff history -a; history -n into your PROMPT_COMMAND.) – jgoldschrafe Nov 4 '10 at 1:58
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Alternatively, you can still use sh vi mode to get the command history:

set -o vi
<ESC> to get in command mode, K to go up the history.
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I don't think this is a bourne shell feature. I'm not sure. Bash certainly has it, google suggests ksh does too. Solaris sh does not, neither does dash. So I would not rely on it being available in all situations. – jmtd Nov 4 '10 at 13:48
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