Linux – How to persist bash history

From the manual,

When Bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists.

/etc/profile by default contains the following code:

# Make sure we start in home unless invoked by CHERE
if [ ! -z "${CHERE_INVOKING}" ]; then
  unset CHERE_INVOKING
else
  cd "${HOME}" || echo "WARNING: Failed attempt to cd into ${HOME}!"
fi

So one solution would be to create a Windows batch file that sets the environment variable CHERE_INVOKING before starting bash. That is not very neat.

Next,

After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable.

These profile scripts by default execute your ~/.bashrc script if it exists. Putting cd - at the end of my .bashrc works for me (with the latest Console2 and Cygwin bash):

echo 'cd -' >> ~/.bashrc

BTW, I invoke Console2 (Console.exe) with no arguments - Windows Explorer ensures that it starts up in the directory that I right-clicked. I'm using XP but I doubt MS would change this behavior in later versions of Windows. I also leave the "startup dir" option blank for my Bash tab.

The problem actually boils down to the different behavior of login and non-login shells. I had set the variables that control history in my ~/.bahsrc. This file is not read when one starts a login shell, it's only read by interactive, non-login shells (from man bash):

When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable. The --noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.

[. . . ]

When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc, if that file exists. This may be inhibited by using the --norc option. The --rcfile file option will force bash to read and execute commands from file instead of ~/.bashrc.

Therefore, each time I logged in, or dropped to a tty, or used ssh, the .history file was getting truncated because I had not set it to the right size in ~/.profile as well. I finally realized this and simply set the variables in ~/.profile where they belong, instead of ~/.bashrc

So, the reason my ~/.history was getting truncated was because I had only set the HISTORY variables in a file read by interactive, non-login shells and therefore every time I ran a different type of shell the variables would be ignored and the file would be cut accordingly.