HIstory command only showing last 15 commands

Question

I enter the command history It shows the last 15 commands, where are the previous 988 commands.

  989  yarn android
  990  /Dir/firebase_dummy_app/chatroom/node_modules/react-native/scripts/launchPackager.command ; exit;
  991  yarn android
  992  source ~/.bashrc
  993  cd Documents
  994  ls
  995  rm -rf firebase_dummy_app
  996  expo init
  997  cd firesbaseDummy
  998  yarn android
  999  cd ..
 1000  rm -rf firesbaseDummy
 1001  /Dir/firesbaseDummy/node_modules/react-native/scripts/launchPackager.command ; exit;
 1002  /Dir/firebaseChat/node_modules/react-native/scripts/launchPackager.command ; exit;
 1003  history
 1004  history

Even if I grep them history | grep 'rm' for something I know I did, none of the previous commands show up

If I continue to enter terminal commands the numbers go up but I'm still limited to only 15. (command 995-1010 will be shown for example

It continues happening when I close the end the terminal app and reopen it

The terminal is zsh on MacOS Catalina

Solution

The history n command, where n is a number shows all history since line n. So in your case, history 904 will show the last 100 commands.

Comments

[Sam]

I've found out a work around is opening .zsh_history but I would still like to know why the command isn't working

[Sam]

So why is regular history only the last 15? Do I have a default set to 15 or something? Where could I change this default?

[Meredith]

Yes the default is set to 15. If it was too long you'd have to scroll through an entire list to find what you might want. I don't think you can change this as a setting, as it is a built-in command

[Sam]

I think it was different in the sh shell. Catalina runs zsh instead of sh and this is the first time I've noticed it

[Meredith]

Yes, I noticed that the other day as well when I updated to zsh.

[Sam]

I think it might be a MacOS Catalina thing

[Gabriel Amorim]

Yeah, maybe it is

[Raghu]

If you want to display everything, you can just type history 1.