Saving a Shell Mode Session

[Matt Brown]

Whenever I'm doing something non-trivial in the shell, I make sure to
use shell-mode and save the session for future reference.  Is there a
way to get emacs to interpret the saved shell session file as such?
The main things I'd like to be able to do are: navigate through the
command history, search only the command history (ignoring the
output), and fold the commands so the output is hidden.  Any ideas if
this is possible?

thanks
-Matt