Ubuntu – How to avoid duplicate entries in .bash_history

bashhistory

The same command is listed in my history again and again. How can I avoid this? I know it's possible via HISTCONTROL but I haven't found the right way.

Best Answer

From the bash man page:

HISTCONTROL

A colon-separated list of values controlling how commands are saved on the history list. If the list of values includes ignorespace, lines which begin with a space character are not saved in the history list. A value of ignoredups causes lines matching the previous history entry to not be saved. A value of ignoreboth is shorthand for ignorespace and ignoredups. A value of erasedups causes all previous lines matching the current line to be removed from the history list before that line is saved. Any value not in the above list is ignored. If HISTCONTROL is unset, or does not include a valid value, all lines read by the shell parser are saved on the history list, subject to the value of HISTIGNORE. The second and subsequent lines of a multi-line compound command are not tested, and are added to the history regardless of the value of HISTCONTROL.

So put the following line in your ~/.bashrc:

export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth:erasedups

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – History list without timestamp and unique the results

Simply, history | sed 's/.[ ]*.[0-9]*.[ ]*//' | uniq | grep -i "heroku"

the sed will remove the any [spaces][numbers][spaces] at the start of each line

for optimization make it

history | grep -i "heroku" | sed 's/.[ ]*.[0-9]*.[ ]*//' | uniq

Ubuntu – How to view the `.bash_history` file via command line

If you want to access the actual file itself, just use your favorite text editor (I use emacs but you can use pluma of gedit or vimor whatever):

emacs ~/.bash_history

That is the default location if your history file. If you don't find anything there, you may have changed the history file's name. This is stored in the $HISTFILE variable, so print it out to check its current value:

echo $HISTFILE

If, instead of the file, you just want to see your history, you can run history as @minerz029 suggested. The history command with no options just prints the contents of your $HISTFILE followed by the commands executed in the current shell that have not yet been written to that file, with line numbers.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – History list without timestamp and unique the results

Ubuntu – How to view the `.bash_history` file via command line

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