Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi I am new here.Hope this has not been already posted.I searched,but couldn't find.
I am currently learning and using lots of new bash commands,I even check sites and try out commands,or visit folders like /usr/bin and /bin etc and just man many of them and try them.
The thing is..I forget some of such commands.I want to save my entire commands history whenever I quit.
Currently the HISTFILESIZE is 500 and that is not enough at all.
I want to write a script to save my history (from all terminal sessions) to some file in appending manner.
Also how do I permanently increase my history file size.
export $HISTFILESIZE=10000 made it so temporarily only..the file still stores only 500.

maybe you should try to use script command instead.

do man script

Hi,

you pls open vi /etc/profile and search "HISTSIZE" and you will change value and logout from terminal and again login and print $echo $HISTSIZE you will must see change.

Cheers,
Bash

When I started my current job, I had to learn a lot of things that were new to me on the command line. I found that the best way to remember the syntax of our internal applications was to search my history file.

So, I threw a little line into my .bash_logout so that I would keep a perpetual history of all my commands. It's a bit more useful than the history, because there is no limit and it eliminates duplicates.

Code:

history | perl -pe 's/^\s+\d+\s+//' | sort | uniq >> ~/.old_commands.log && cat ~/.old_commands.log | sort | uniq > ~/old_commands.log && cp ~/old_commands.log ~/.old_commands.log

What it does: Take the history, strip off leading digits (the command sequence number), and add them to a file, sorted and unique. I'm sure people on here will find some ways to improve it, but it works well enough for me as-is, and has helped me a great many times.

ShawnMilo

Hm.. I too just put it into my bash_logout.Let see how it goes.I also found another interesting link my friend provided.

Code:

http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20070611/008584.html

but hey let me ask..bash_logout doesn't execute when I close my terminal sessions does it?
The file old_commands.log has not yet been created.

It executes for me on logout. Are you sure you're using bash? Also, the filename should begin with a period: .bash_logout

It's not clear from your message how you have named it.

Shawn