bash history unleashed

I’m a big fan of set -o vi in bash, and a also of multiple tabbed terminal windows as a way to keep multiple programming/debugging/experimenting contexts active simultaneously.

Nevertheless, it took me almost ten years to take ten minutes to lookup the settings which merge the histories of several terminals in a common file, as opposed to each terminal overwriting the other’s history when exiting.

So here it is, mostly as a note to self:

export HISTSIZE=5000
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
shopt -s histappend

/me is happy with his big “treasure chest” history file…

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 2:32 pm and is filed under tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to bash history unleashed

  1. Gregor J. Rothfuss says:
    June 29, 2007 at 11:55 pm

    Thanks! I didn’t know that.

  2. Greg says:
    July 18, 2007 at 12:30 pm

    And thanks from me. I’ve always been annoyed by the overwriting behaviour.

    If you’re looking for something similar in tcsh, check out this (it doesn’t just apply to OSX): http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070715091413640

  3. Lubos Kocman says:
    January 17, 2011 at 5:09 pm

    Following variable PROMPT_COMMAND=”history -a” forces bash to write all to the HISTFILE immediately and not at the end of the session.

    Anyway thanks for ignoredups.

%d bloggers like this: