Bash history loss when using histappend

bashhistory

I like to keep a lot of history, so I have histappend set in my .bashrc. Most of the time everything works fine, with history built up from many shells appending. However, every once and a while, I'll start a new shell and find that I've lost the entire history – and it often only contains some of the commands from the last shell to exit (i.e. it's not just overwriting instead of appending). Because of this, I'm suspicious it's happening at shell exit, rather than from some other process killing the .bash_history file. Supporting this conclusion, I have history command numbers in my prompt, and I've never seen them jump down.

Anyone ever run into a similar problem? Or even just have suggestions how to track down the problem?

Best Answer

Sorry to answer my own question, but none of the other answers really address the problem.

I've finally figured out that this only happens when closing gnome-terminal itself (i.e. file > exit, the 'x' button, alt+F4), and even then generally only when closing several terminals in quick succession. It never happens when using ctrl-D to close the shell, letting the terminal follow.

If I can pin it down well enough, I'll file a gnome-terminal bug report. In the meantime, perhaps this will help some other people who get here from google!

Related Solutions

Prevent Bash from Altering History – How to Guide

You want the readline setting:

set revert-all-at-newline on

You can either put it in ~/.inputrc (see note below), or put bind 'revert-all-at-newline on' in your ~/.bashrc.

Demo:

$ man bash
$ bind 'set revert-all-at-newline on'
$ man bsh # up arrow and edit
No manual entry for bsh
$ man bash # three up arrows

Further details are in the Bash manpage:

revert-all-at-newline

If set to ‘on’, Readline will undo all changes to history lines before returning when accept-line is executed. By default, history lines may be modified and retain individual undo lists across calls to readline. The default is ‘off’.

Note:

If a new ~/.inputrc file is created for the purpose of setting revert-all-at-newline, be aware that bash will use the readline settings in this file instead of any settings which may be in the file /etc/inputrc. That is, any settings specified in /etc/inputrc will no longer be in effect. Therefore, if the /etc/inputrc file exists, it's a good idea to start ~/.inputrc with the line:

$include /etc/inputrc

Bash: execute command given in commandline and don’t exit

I seem to have found a way to solve this so that the job control works:

bash --rcfile <(cat ${HOME}/.bashrc; echo 'export PROMPT_COMMAND="vim; export PROMPT_COMMAND="') -i

This creates custom bashrc file on the fly and uses PROMPT_COMMAND variable to delay the Vim start so that job control should work. This of course can be generalized to not be Vim specific.

Ok, just tested this with terminator and at least seems to work with config file:

[profiles]
[[default]]
    use_custom_command = True
    custom_command = "bash --rcfile <(cat ${HOME}/.bashrc; echo 'export PROMPT_COMMAND="vim; export PROMPT_COMMAND="') -i"

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Prevent Bash from Altering History – How to Guide

Bash: execute command given in commandline and don’t exit

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