Marc Abramowitz » Don’t lose history in bash

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3/19/2005

Don’t lose history in bash

March 19th 2005 Posted to Computers, General, UNIX, bash

I don’t think I’ve relied too heavily on bash’s history feature in the past, because often what I needed to recall wasn’t there. The reason why is that if you have multiple bash shells, by default each one rewrites the entire .bash_history file when it exits, which means that you keep losing stuff. It turns out that there is a very easy way to fix this - add these lines to your bash startup files:

shopt -s histappend PROMPT_COMMAND=’history -a’

I have no idea why this is not the default behavior!

This and other bash tips here

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