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Better Bash History (2012)

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Re: Better Bash History (2012)

#11

Post by jackewiehose »

kbd wrote: post #9

Bash's broken history is what finally got me to switch to Zsh. The history behavior you want is: 1. each line of history is appended incrementally, but 2. each shell session only has access to its own history unless you specifically reload the history into your session. Every combination of history commands in bash didn't do the right thing[1], but Zsh's works as desired. [1] eg. putting 'history -a' in PROMPT_COMMAN…

> [1] eg. putting history -a in PROMPT_COMMAND as the article recommends appends your session's entire history each time, IIRC.

No, only the last command. Very handy because that way you can start a new terminal and have your current history available immediately. I also have an alias r='history -n'. With this you can load the history of another terminal session directly into the current session.

Re: Better Bash History (2012)

#12

Post by kbd »

cortesoft wrote: post #10
kbd wrote: post #9

Bash's broken history is what finally got me to switch to Zsh. The history behavior you want is: 1. each line of history is appended incrementally, but 2. each shell session only has access to its own history unless you specifically reload the history into your session. Every combination of history commands in bash didn't do the right thing[1], but Zsh's works as desired. [1] eg. putting 'history -a' in PROMPT_COMMAN…

See, what I want from my history is every command I have ever run, so that ctrl r can find anything I have done.

Yes what I wrote doesn't exclude that. The only distinction is that you generally don't want all your sessions' histories interleaved. I.e. when you up-arrow, you only want your current session's history, without random things from other active sessions in there too. If you do want "everything you've ever done" including things from other sessions that started after your current session, it's easy to reload your history into your session. I have a 'rlh' (reload history) alias for that.

Re: Better Bash History (2012)

#13

Post by jackewiehose »

kbd wrote: post #12
cortesoft wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, what I want from my history is every command I have ever run, so that ctrl r can find anything I have done.

Yes what I wrote doesn't exclude that. The only distinction is that you generally don't want all your sessions' histories interleaved. I.e. when you up-arrow, you only want your current session's history, without random things from other active sessions in there too. If you do want "everything you've ever done" including things from other sessions that started after your current session, it's easy to reload your hist…

You always only have your current session history in each bash (unless you reload the history manually) so there is no interleaving.

Re: Better Bash History (2012)

#14

Post by kbd »

jackewiehose wrote: post #13
kbd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes what I wrote doesn't exclude that. The only distinction is that you generally don't want all your sessions' histories interleaved. I.e. when you up-arrow, you only want your current session's history, without random things from other active sessions in there too. If you do want "everything you've ever done" including things from other sessions that started after your current session, it's easy to reload your hist…

You always only have your current session history in each bash (unless you reload the history manually) so there is no interleaving.

Yeah I know, I was just making a distinction from cortesoft's "I want everything I've ever done" in my history. I was saying "so do I, except I want active sessions separate" (which as you point out, they are by default).

Re: Better Bash History (2012)

#15

Post by stilist »

Since everybody has their own way of handling it, mine is

* Generate a new history file for every session (https://github.com/stilist/dotfiles/blob/master/dot_sh/sessi...)

* A 'histgrep' script that searches across all the files and highlights matches (https://github.com/stilist/dotfiles/blob/master/dot_sh/bin/e...)

Re: Better Bash History (2012)

#16

Post by kbd »

jackewiehose wrote: post #11
kbd wrote: post #9

Bash's broken history is what finally got me to switch to Zsh. The history behavior you want is: 1. each line of history is appended incrementally, but 2. each shell session only has access to its own history unless you specifically reload the history into your session. Every combination of history commands in bash didn't do the right thing[1], but Zsh's works as desired. [1] eg. putting 'history -a' in PROMPT_COMMAN…

> [1] eg. putting history -a in PROMPT_COMMAND as the article recommends appends your session's entire history each time, IIRC. No, only the last command. Very handy because that way you can start a new terminal and have your current history available immediately. I also have an alias r='history -n'. With this you can load the history of another terminal session directly into the current session.

Just tested it and 'history -a' behaves how you say. Maybe it was an older version of bash that had this behavior.

Edit: now I'm obsessing about reproducing this behavior from years ago! If anyone knows what I'm talking about I'd be grateful for some validation :)

Re: Better Bash History (2012)

#17

Post by MarcScott »

I've had this in my .bashrc for years. I thought it came from this post judging from my commments, but looks different, so I wonder whether it came from HN comments when this was previously posted.

  ## Better bash history
  # Avoid duplicates
  export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:erasedups
  # When the shell exits, append to the history file instead of overwriting it
  shopt -s histappend
  # After each command, append to the history file and reread it
  export PROMPT_COMMAND="${PROMPT_COMMAND:+$PROMPT_COMMAND$'\n'}history -a; history -c; history -r"

Re: Better Bash History (2012)

#18

Post by mrzool »

I love this blog and learned so much about the Unix toolkit and the philosophy behind it by reading it. Too bad it doesn’t seem to be much active anymore, but there’s a lot of great material in the archives that pretty much never gets old since its focused mostly on standard Unix software. The author (Tom Ryder) is an very talented writer with a clear and concise style.

A couple of plugs for your consideration:

- I integrated all of these history options in my project Sensible Bash [1], an attempt at saner Bash defaults

- I made an ebook [2] out of a series which appeared on this blog, titled “Unix as IDE”.

[1]: https://github.com/mrzool/bash-sensible

[2]: https://github.com/mrzool/unix-as-ide

Re: Better Bash History (2012)

#20

Post by graton »

tapoxi wrote: post #2

highly recommended for fellow ctrl-r addicts: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

I also recommend FZF. Really very handy for doing CTRL-R searches.

I also use it for doing interactive git rebases. I have an alias for doing a fuzzy rebase interactive (frbi):

   frbi = !git rebase -i $(git log --pretty=oneline --color=always | fzf --ansi | cut -d ' ' -f1)^
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