Take control of your bash_history
I spend most of my time working in front of a black and white terminal of remote SSH connections to various servers.
This means that I use bash (as my preferred shell) most of the day. And bash history is a very important feature of bash that saves me much time by recalling previous commands I have typed.
Here are some tricks on how you can optimize with some simple configurations settings the usage your bash history.
1. Append to History
history -a
Append the new history lines (history lines entered since the beginning of the current Bash session) to the history file.
2. Clear History
history -c
(clear the history)
3. Write History to file
history -w
(write to the file – overwrite!)
4. Dont save duplicate commands in the history
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
5. Size of the history:
HISTSIZE=500
HISTSIZE: The number of commands to remember in the command history. The default value is 500.
How do you set these 4-5 options? Either export them in your environment in your personal bash configuration file (~/.bashrc) or in the global bash configuration file (/etc/bash.bashrc).
export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth export HISTSIZE=500
