Ubuntu – bash doesn’t keep history

bashhistory

I run Ubuntu 12.04, and for some reason bash does not keep my command history. the ~/.bash_history file contains only 3 commands that I typed a few months ago.

How can I fix this?

EDIT:
here's the relevant content of my .bashrc:

# ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files (in the package bash-doc)
# for examples

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

# don't put duplicate lines or lines starting with space in the history.
# See bash(1) for more options
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth

# append to the history file, don't overwrite it
shopt -s histappend

# for setting history length see HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE in bash(1)
HISTSIZE=1000
HISTFILESIZE=2000

Best Answer

It could also be that root:root owns your .bash_history (ROOT SHOULDN'T BE THE OWNER, YOUR USER SHOULD BE THE OWNER!), in that case you need to:

$ chown user:user .bash_history

This apparently could happen magically when you do sudo bash a lot!

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Ubuntu – How to get long command lines to wrap to the next line

Make sure all non-printable bytes in your PS1 are contained within \[ \]. Otherwise, bash will count them in the length of the prompt. It uses the length of the prompt to determine when to wrap the line.

For example, here bash counts the prompt as 19 columns wide, while the prompt displayed by the terminal is only 10 columns wide (My prompt written in cyan, and > written in default color):

PS1='\e[36mMy prompt\e[0m>'         # bash count: 19, actual: 10

while here it only counts the prompt as 10 columns wide because it ignores the bytes between the special \[ and \] escapes:

PS1='\[\e[36m\]My prompt\[\e[0m\]>' # bash count: 10, actual: 10

For good practice though, use tput to generate the terminal escapes rather than hard coding them:

cyan=$(tput setaf 6) # \e[36m
reset=$(tput sgr0)   # \e[0m
PS1='\[$cyan\]My prompt\[$reset\]>'

See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/053, and also http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/scripting/terminalcodes for more on tput.

Ubuntu – How to the script determine whether it’s being run by bash or dash

You can make the fact that $BASH_VERSION is blank in dash work for you:

if [ "$BASH_VERSION" = '' ]; then
    echo "This is dash."
else
    echo "This is bash."
fi

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