History marches on -Why?

hussar · 11-27-2005, 11:32 AM

When I do something like `history | grep somepastcmdofinterest`, my history list is up to 962 lines. When I issue the command `echo $HISTFILESIZE`, I get 500.

Any thoughts on why my history file could be growing to these proportions and how I could get it to pay attention to the $HISTFILESIZE variable? Also, I seem to remember reading somewhere that you can get history to ignore duplicates, that is, commands that have been entered repeatedly. How do you do that?

keefaz · 11-27-2005, 11:44 AM

For the duplicate commands I believe you can add :

Code:

export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups

... somewhere in your bashrc or similar

For the size of .bash_history, I don't know, are the 900 lines filled with only commands,
no timestamp ?

[edit]
From man bash :

Code:

HISTFILESIZE
              The maximum number of lines contained in the history file.  When
              this  variable  is  assigned  a value, the history file is trun-
              cated, if necessary, to contain no  more  than  that  number  of
              lines.   The  default  value  is  500.  The history file is also
              truncated to this size after  writing  it  when  an  interactive
              shell exits.

So you have to exit the shell for the history file be trucated to 500 lines