General Instructions for using the history | split command sequence.

When you are asked to screen shot your command history, do so by entering the commands shown below and by following the directions that follow (Note: the first command "cd" takes you to your home directory and is not necessary if you are already in your home directory):

cd

history | split --lines=20 --numeric-suffixes

ls x*

Note: ls x* is on its’ own line.

This command will first get your command line history from your personal history file.   It will then pipe (or send) the history output to the split command.  The split command will then create files to contain your history, with 20 lines going into each file until there are no more history lines to be stuffed into files. These files will have a prefix of ‘x’ and will be suffixed starting with 00 and ending with a number that represents the last, 20-line file that was created from the history command’s output. The screen shots should be of the contents of each x file (x00 thru x??) by using the cat command. For example: cat x00 will display the contents of the first file, cat x01 will display the contents of the second file, etc. until you cat the contents of the entire list of x00 – x## files. If you wish to reduce the number of these x files, then increase the number of lines specified in the split command. If you need to delete the x files and try again, type the following command:

rm -f x*

A demonstration of this technique is shown below.