I run Gentoo and was wondering if anyone knows how can I get bash to dump my current shell cli history to .bash_history when I type reboot or shutdown. When I bounce my box if I don't exit the shell then it doesn't write my command history to the bash_history. I had this issue with Linux From Scratch too.

I was hoping it would be a setting in bashrc, or /etc/profile but I can't find anything that stands out to writing the history on a init. Since I had this issue with LFS I looked there and found this.
http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermai...ne/060297.html

I have no clue on how to get it to do the SIGHUP. I suppose I would need to grab the source for shutdown, modify it and recompile shutdown. Anyone else have any better suggestions? Is there a way I can get the initlevel to run some commands before issuing the init 6?

Thanks,
Nick

Try adding this to the end of your ~/.bashrc:

# append shell commands to the history file as they are
# used, instead of waiting until shell exit to write
# to the history file.
shopt -s histappend

# when displaying the shell prompt, write the previous
# command line to history file.
PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a'

Thanks BigRigDriver, I guess that is going to be my best bet. I saw that as an option in the LFS post but wasn't sure if there was some other way around it that I might be missing.

I appreciate it.

-Nick