Bash does not honor ~/.inputrc

Let's start with a small example.

Fire up Automator and create a service with a single "Run Shell Script" step.

Set it to take Folders as input from Finder

Pass input as arguments. Shell is /bin/bash

Bash code:

cd "$@"

for file in *.mov *.flk *.mp4
    do
    ls -1 "$file" >> ~/Desktop/test_file_awk.txt
done

What this does it takes the directory you pass in as "$@" and goes into it then runs the command on all the files in that directory.

"$@" is in quotes to protect against spaces, as is "$file"

So, you can replicate this to your setup:

cd "$@"
i=$(for file in {*.flv,*.mov,*.mp4,*.m4v}
    do 
    /usr/local/bin/mediainfo "--Inform=Video;%Duration%" "$file"
done | awk '{total+=$0}END{print total}')

((i/=1000, sec=i%60, i/=60, min=i%60, hrs=i/60))
timestamp=$(printf "%dh%02dm%02ds" $hrs $min $sec)
echo -e "Total duration of video files in this folder:\n\n$timestamp" > _total_duration.txt

Personally, I would change the output to something like:

> ~/Desktop/"$@"_total_duration.txt

So that the data ends up on your desktop in a file named for the folder, but I have a lot of media directories and I don't want txt files in them.

Begin isolating the source of the problem by removing any customizations of Bash’s history. For example, any code that sets shell variables that begin with HIST, or uses set -o to set either the history or histexpand shell options.

The per-session command history code in /etc/bashrc_Apple_Terminal attempts to maintain compatibility with Bash’s history variables, and tries to detect when the user is probably doing something it can’t be compatible with and disables the mechanism in that case (because the user is doing something arbitrary, like loading, saving or modifying the history). However, if you have scripts that run the history command, that code has no way of knowing in advance; you’ll need to either update your code to maintain compatibility with the new per-session command history, or disable the per-session history by setting SHELL_SESSION_HISTORY=0 as described in the documentation in /etc/bashrc_Apple_Terminal.

If you’re not customizing HISTFILE, HISTTIMEFORMAT or the histappend shell option, another thing to check is if your shell startup script(s) modify either PROMPT_COMMAND variable or the EXIT trap without concatenating the previous value to avoid wiping it out.

See the comments in /etc/bashrc_Apple_Terminal for a description of how the mechanism works and how to customize or disable it.