The "History" Command?
 

I recall my old work colleague show me a history command that allows you to search the history for all commands that started with lets say "wget" or whatever you're looking for rather than everything in your history cache. I attempted a Google search and could not find anything that shows me how to refine the history search.

Anyone know what I am looking for?

grep?

It works like this:

cat ~/.bash_history | grep wget

Thanks - that does the trick however I recall there being a command with in the history command that allows you to do the same thing w/o using "grep"

Either way, it appears the results are the same...

You also might check out the event designator "!", which lets you quickly print (with or without executing) the most recent command that starts with a certain string.

Contrived example:
The :p modifier tells bash to print but not execute the command.

In any case, that still doesn't sound like quite what you're looking for; check out the extensive manpages for bash(1). There's a good sized section on history and related topics there.

Use CTRL+R
 

Use the above combination of the keys to search for a string.. very helpful indeed.

I see smehra24 has already answered.

Just use EMACS commands.

What you want is

Ctrl-R is the usual EMACS reverse search command.

Look in "info bash" for more info.