Bash – Commands Not Appearing in History When Terminal Opens

bashcommand history

I have the simple following terminal.sh script:

#bin/bash --login
str=(--tab --title="Test" -e "bash --login -c 'echo history';bash")
gnome-terminal "${str[@]}"
exit 0

I basically use it to open a terminal with several tabs that I need to use daily. But the problem is that the echo history command is not added to the history of that tab. So, for example, one of my tabs is the application server. When I need to restart it, I usually type Ctrl+C, Ctrl+L, Up and Enter, but when I use this script to run it, it doesn't add the line executed to the bash, and then the last command executed is normally exit. So I end up closing the tab instead of restarting the server, which is incredbly annoying.

I saw this, and I tried adding:

HISTFILE=~/.bash_history
set -o history

To the start of my terminal.sh script, and also tried adding to the script executed:

str=(--tab --title="Test" -e "bash --login -c 'HISTFILE=~/.bash_history;set -o history;echo a';bash")

But neither helped. I also tried adding history -s echo history before executing the script, but that didn't help either.

How can I add all commands executed this way to the history?

I aslo tried:

#bin/bash --login

cmd='echo test'
cmd_e="bash --login -c 'unset PROMPT_COMMAND;history -s '\''$cmd'\''; eval '\''$cmd'\''';bash"
str=(--tab --title="History Test" -e "$cmd_e")

gnome-terminal "${str[@]}"

exit 0

Best Answer

You could do something like:

SHELL=/bin/bash PROMPT_COMMAND='unset PROMPT_COMMAND; history -s "$CMD";
    eval "$CMD"' CMD='vi /etc/issue' gnome-terminal

(here using vi /etc/issue as your command).

That has the advantage of running $CMD as a job of that shell, so you can suspend resume, interrupt it as other jobs and it can affect the environment of the shell (for instance you can do CMD='PATH=$foo:$PATH').

It assumes your ~/.bashrc doesn't set $PROMPT_COMMAND itself.

Edit:

For multiple tabs:

PROMPT_COMMAND='unset PROMPT_COMMAND; history -s "$CMD"; eval "$CMD"
  ' gnome-terminal --tab --title /etc/issue -e 'env CMD="vi /etc/issue" bash' \
                   --tab --title who -e 'env CMD=who bash'

Related Solutions

Bash Command History – Enable Timestamps in Bash History

Yes, put this in ~/.bashrc :

export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '

Then, run the following commands :

. ~/.bashrc
history

It will look like this :

 (...)
 5200  2012-09-30 23:55:37 find -printf '%Ts %f\n'
 5201  2012-10-01 00:00:58 ls
 5202  2012-10-01 00:03:45 cd
 (...)

Explanations of the output :

first col is the unique id
second one is the date, third is the hour
latest is your command line

Bash – does history not overwrite but append when histappend is set to off in Bash

@David Dai is correct about this bash-help thread.

Here is the relevant bash code in C.

if (history_lines_this_session <= where_history () || force_append_history)
  {
    result = append_history (history_lines_this_session, hf);
    history_lines_in_file += history_lines_this_session;
  }
else
  {
    result = write_history (hf);
    history_lines_in_file = history_lines_this_session;
  }

shopt -s histappend sets force_append_history to non-zero (true).

history_lines_this_session is the number of commands you typed this interactive bash session. When you first start bash, it is 0. It increases by 1 each time you Enter a command that is saved to history.

where_history() is an index into the in-memory history list, starting at index 0. It points to the next index to write history to. For example, when you have 0 history, it will be index 0. When you have 6 lines of history, it will be index 6.

When you first start bash and you have history in your HISTFILE, where_history() increase but will be limited to <= HISTSIZE. So where_history() has a maximum value of HISTSIZE.

After reading the HISTFILE, where_history() will increase but history_lines_this_session will still be 0. When you Enter HISTSIZE + 1 number of commands, history_lines_this_session == HISTSIZE + 1 and where_history() == HISTSIZE (because it is capped at the maximum). At this point, (history_lines_this_session <= where_history()) == false so history will be overwritten if histappend is off.

You can test this out in your bash yourself. If histappend is off, once you run HISTSIZE + 1 number of commands, history_lines_this_session will exceed where_history() by 1 and HISTFILE will be overwritten. You have to make sure other commands aren't messing with your history for the test to work though (happens on macOS). Use the following commands to turn off commands that may mess with history:

trap - EXIT
PROMPT_COMMAND=
SHELL_SESSION_HISTORY=0 # for macOS only

Best Answer

Edit:

Related Solutions

Bash Command History – Enable Timestamps in Bash History

Bash – does history not overwrite but append when histappend is set to off in Bash

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