history and ! in bash

In the bash shell, typing:

history n

will give you a numbered list of the last n commands on that user (omit n for loads of history - about 1000 or so)

then typing:

!x

where x is a number from the history list, will execute the command enumerated by x.

useful for that command that you know you did, but you can't quite remember the syntax for.

(this is a James Wallbank uber-geek command!)