• andrew@lemmy.stuart.funEnglish
    16·
    2 years ago

    I legitimately back up my history file. Mostly because it likes to truncate itself randomly (though this may have been fixed in zsh, or my config, because it’s been a while). Just a systemd timer that triggers a shell script to copy it by date and rotate anything older than 100 copies.

    Edit: WHY DID I SAY ANYTHING? After like 3 months of no problems, my history truncated itself to 3 entries a few minutes ago. I’ve only ever seen a few days of loss before that lol.

      • andrew@lemmy.stuart.funEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        I did try it for a bit. IIRC it slowed me down more than I cared for. Maybe worth trying again, though.

    • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
      3·
      2 years ago

      I’m annoyed when my thirteen bash instances don’t share history, but I’d probably be a lot more annoyed if they did.

      • andrew@lemmy.stuart.funEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        That’s one thing I like about zsh, or my config at least, because I use i3 and therefore tend to open lots of shells. History is mostly local until I hit return twice (two empty prompts) at which point I can get history from other sessions. It’s stuck more global at that point though aside from future history.

    • mumblerfish@lemmy.world
      13·
      2 years ago

      Was working on a server where I did not want to put some dumb command into the history, so I add a space like you do. Press up. The command is there. The fucking insult I felt.

      • PoolloverNathan@programming.dev
        2·
        2 years ago

        It’s disabled by default, but you can enable it in .bashrc and then delete that edit session using a spaced command.

        Edit: brain fart

      • superbirra@lemmy.world
        21·
        2 years ago

        it also depends on the shell, in zsh it persists on local history but does not get written to history file

    • survivalmachine@beehaw.org
      9·
      2 years ago

      history displays a list of all commands you have run on the terminal since the history list was last cleared. It is invaluable for referring back to a big complex command or set of commands you ran at some point in the past. The -c flag clears that history.

        • survivalmachine@beehaw.org
          1·
          2 years ago

          Yes, my comment only applies to the shell history in memory. -c clears history immediately, but you can still reload it from disk if you haven’t overwritten that with -w. If you tend to close your terminal windows frequently and rely on the history feature between sessions, it would benefit you to learn about the intricacies of the on-disk copy of history and how its affected by writes, appends, clears, crashes, etc. I tend to leave my terminal windows open a long time and copy any complex commands out to my PKM if I need to save them for future sessions, so I generally try not to rely on .bash_history, but it has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.

    • akdas@lemmy.world
      6·
      2 years ago

      It lets you clear the bash command history, either completely or selectively. Here’s the GNU docs for the history builtin: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-History-Builtins.html#index-history

      (I’m not too familiar, someone else can clarify: is this available outside bash?)

      What’s interesting to me is the -a option, which lets you “flush” the history for the current session without ending the session. I can see that being useful!