• andrew
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    5 months 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
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        35 months 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
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      35 months 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
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        25 months 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.

      • andrew
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        25 months ago

        Fortunately I have my hourly backups! 😅

    • @mumblerfish@lemmy.world
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      5 months 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.

    • @survivalmachine@beehaw.org
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      95 months 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.

      • @umbrella@lemmy.ml
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        45 months ago

        dont you also need history -w to save it?

        on ubuntu -c doesnt actually clear it unless you also use -w

        • @survivalmachine@beehaw.org
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          5 months 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
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      5 months 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!