One of my most used commands in Linux is the history command, it lists all your recent commands. The problem with this is you might have to scroll through hundreds before you get to one of any interest, so adding grep to search through these and bring back only relative one’s is great.

Give it a try (just change searchcriteria for what you want like apt-get or tar):

history | grep searchcriteria

Manual pages:

• history
• grep