MacOS – Bash History missing from Terminal

bashmacosterminal

After an OS update, my bash history is suddenly gone – typing "history" at a terminal window (sudo or standard) yields only the commands entered after the upgrade.

What could have happened here?

Best Answer

In this particular case, I found that the history had gotten into a strange state.

Nothing was present in the .bash_history file, however, there were plenty of saved sessions in the .bash_sessions folder of the user root (e.g. ~).

Once inside the .bash_sessions folder, I found there was a file with a GUID and a .historynew extension.

Ex:

~/.bash_sessions/{GUID}.historynew

That file contained the lost commands, but somehow was no longer attached to the saved history for the user. From there I simply piped the output and appended to the .bash_history file, and started a new session and everything was back. One way to do this:

cat {GUID}.historynew >> ../.bash_history

Related Solutions

How to make bash (Terminal.app) remember history of previous sessions

You'll need to tell bash where to keep your history file, and how many lines to keep:

# Set the location of your HISTFILE
echo "export HISTFILE=/Users/<USERNAME>/.bash_history" >> ~/.bash_profile

# Number of lines to keep (1000 in this example)
echo "export HISTFILESIZE=1000" >> ~/.bash_profile

# Set how many commands to keep in the current session history list
echo "export HISTSIZE=80" >> ~/.bash_profile

# Ignore commands that start with a space
echo "export HISTIGNORE=\"&:[ ]*:exit\"" >> ~/.bash_profile

MacOS – Infinite scrollback in Terminal (Yosemite)

Here's an option for running a script on startup to append everything to a log file. Searching a text file will likely be a better option than manually scrolling up in Terminal, or filling up a buffer.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120507163311559

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to make bash (Terminal.app) remember history of previous sessions

MacOS – Infinite scrollback in Terminal (Yosemite)

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