On Mon Sep 16 16:34:31 UTC 2013, zGreenfelder zgreenfelder at gmail.com wrote: >On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 12:27 PM, > James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca>wrote: >> I am obviously missing something basic here but can someone explain >> to me what is wrong with the first statement, which returns nothing? >> >> $ history | grep ^su >> $ history | grep su >> 2997 su -l >> 3024 su -l >> 3050 su -l >> 3054 su -l > there are numbers at the start of the line? Duh! Thanks. I could not see the forest for the trees I guess. I ended up with the following as I wanted a visual scan of all variants not just the most recent: history | cut -f1-3 -d " " --complement | grep ^su This is in the bash shell on CentOS-6.4. -- *** E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel *** James B. Byrne mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca Harte & Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca 9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241 Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757 Canada L8E 3C3