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Here’s a pet peeve of mine: programs that only save their settings/history when you close them. If the program session is long-lived, proper closures become very rare; a crash or a sudden reboot becomes much more likely. History and settings are lost!

bash suffers from this affliction. Terminals stay open for long periods, yet history is only saved on close. In addition to the risk of losing said history, it also means that history from one session cannot be accessed in other concurrent sessions. In fact, concurrent sessions may overwrite the history saved by other sessions!

My bash history is sacrosanct; the mental friction of not being able to recall a command you just ran is super-frustrating, and the prospect that it might be lost forever is simply unacceptable. Follow the steps below to make your bash history behave sanely.

Step 1: save history after every command

Add to your .bashrc:

export PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a"

This forces saving the history every time a command is run, instead of waiting until the terminal is closed. If you open a new terminal, it will have access to the other (still open) terminal’s history.

However, there is still an annoyance. Once terminal #2 is open, its history effectively ‘forks’, and will not get updates for any subsequent commands from terminal #1! This is because terminals only load history once when they’re first invoked.

Step 2: forcibly refresh history

Create a bash alias:

alias refresh='history -c; history -r'

Calling refresh will reload the latest history from disk into your session, giving you access to recent commands from other sessions. However, if you use advanced history features like referencing commands by their position in the history (!!, !3, etc.), reloading the history can interfere with that, as it reorders the entries in the history. Also, some people like keeping their history siloed per session when mulitple sessions are devoted to different tasks. For these reasons, history refresh is made available to run on demand, rather than doing it automatically.

Step 3: protect your history

None of the above steps are much good if we don’t ensure that our history sticks around. Add the following to .bashrc:

shopt -s histappend
HISTSIZE=1000000
HISTFILESIZE=1000000

This protects against history loss both from shells clobbering the history file, and from exceeding the limit of saved history entries (which is laughably low by default).

(Also, if you ever run a command that you don’t want saved in the history, simply prepend that command with a space before executing.)