Philippe Lang wrote:
1) First of all, there is a nice feature under FreeBSD: on a shell, command history can be filtered with a few characters, when using the up arrow. For example, if you rember you restarted a deamon before, you can type "/etc/i" and then press the up arrow key. Only past command that start with "/etc/i" appear, like "/etc/init.d/apache2 restart".
As some others have pointed out, that is a feature of the shell. With the default shell (bash) and vi key-bindings (set -o vi), you can accomplish that with: <esc>//etc/i<cr> This causes the most recent occurence of a command that matches the initial sequence '/etc/i', and you can then cycle through the history list with 'n'. Incidentally, ^r also works with the vi-key bindings turned on, but it feels obscene to use it :)