S-PLUS (but not plain S) provides a mechanism for recall and correction of previous commands. For interactive use this is a vital facility and greatly increases the productive output of most people. To invoke S-PLUS with the command recall facility enabled use the -e flag:
Splus -e
Within the session, command recall is available using either emacs-style or vi-style commands. The former is very similar to
command recall with an interactive shell such as tcsh. Details are
given in Appendix 
of these notes, or they may be found in
the reference manual or the online help documents.