BASHing things up

Posted: 2009-11-24 01:20:23 by Alasdair Keyes

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Anyone who uses Linux will most likely be familiar with BASH the Bourne Again SHell. Although on the whole it is fantastic out of the box and requires no customisation to be useful, however there are a few tiny things that niggle at me which I have finally looked into sorting, so I thought I might share...

If you work as part of a team to administer servers, you will no doubt have found that BASH's standard history logging can be a bit lacking. If two people are logged in under the same user (such as root), you will find that whoever logs out last will have their history added to the ~/.bash_history file, the user to log out first has their changes wiped out... this is because when you logout BASH saves your history completely over-writing the file. This can be a great pain especially when you need to log back in and look at what you did. To change this set the following in your ~/.bashrc, which tells BASH to append your changes instead of completely overwrite. Be warned, you will have to keep an eye on the size of your history file,

shopt -s histappend

The second annoyance I has is that if your network connection to the remote machine died or the box froze/rebooted then your last bash session's history would not be saved as it only saves on logout. To get BASH to save instantly, add the following

PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a'

I hope this helps those with similar issues.

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