Most Command Line Shells have a built-in feature to record commands that have been issued. This has two purposes - a record of what was done as well as a convenient way to repeat commands. For the purposes of this discussion, the focus will be BASH, simply because it is the most commonly used enterprise command line shell.

To view commands that have been run, issue the history command. These are stored in the ~/.bash_history file.

The file size is limited based by two environment variables - HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE. These are declared in a couple of different places depending on this distribution in question. In RHEL family distributions, /etc/profile has a default value of 1,000 for HISTSIZE, and in the Debian family, each user inherits a HISTFILESIZE of 2,000 and a HISTSIZE of 1,000 from the /etc/skel/.bashrc