On Mon, 2012-01-30 at 20:16 +0200, Pierre Gaston wrote: > On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 8:01 PM, Ivan Yosifov <iyosi...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > > > I got an admittedly basic question but I'm really at my wits' end with > > this. > > > > How do I enable infinite command history ? > > > > One simple suggestion I've seen online is to set HISTSIZE and > > HISTFILESIZE to a large number. This is not what I need, I want > > genuinely unconstrained history file growth. > > > > Another idea I've seen is to unset HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE. This > > doesn't seem to work, the history file is being cropped to the default > > of 500 lines. > > > > I'm probably missing something obvious but any help is appreciated. I'm > > running Bash 4.1.5 (Debian Squeeze). > > I don't think there is a way. > But do you plan to use bash normally? > Setting HISTFILESIZE to 2147483647 gives you 68 years of history at > one command per seconds > (I hope I got my math right) > with say 5 chars per commands it's something like 5GB of history.
On Mon, 2012-01-30 at 20:16 +0200, Pierre Gaston wrote: On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 8:01 PM, Ivan Yosifov <iyosi...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > > > I got an admittedly basic question but I'm really at my wits' end with > > this. > > > > How do I enable infinite command history ? > > > > One simple suggestion I've seen online is to set HISTSIZE and > > HISTFILESIZE to a large number. This is not what I need, I want > > genuinely unconstrained history file growth. > > > > Another idea I've seen is to unset HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE. This > > doesn't seem to work, the history file is being cropped to the default > > of 500 lines. > > > > I'm probably missing something obvious but any help is appreciated. I'm > > running Bash 4.1.5 (Debian Squeeze). > > I don't think there is a way. > But do you plan to use bash normally? > Setting HISTFILESIZE to 2147483647 gives you 68 years of history at > one command per seconds > (I hope I got my math right) > with say 5 chars per commands it's something like 5GB of history. > Thank you for stating it clearly. I suppose I'll either use the above number or mess a bit with the source. My actual use case for this is as follows: Sometimes I run some useful and non-trivial command that I don't want to bother writing down somewhere separate but I want to be able to find later by grepping the history file. For example, more than a year ago I used a pipeline to convert a .flac music file to .mp3. I still remember the the name of the song involved so I could easily find the command with grep (if the history file still had it, of course). On the other hand, I do a lot of work from the shell anyway. So the history file gets flooded with trivia like make invocations, cd <some autocompleted name that could be 200 characters long>, etc, etc. In the end, I had set HISTFILESIZE to some supposedly large number and a year later I couldn't find the flac->mp3 command any more, so I wanted the history rotation turned off entirely. I got hundreds of GB of free hdd space so I absolutely don't care about the size of the history file. Maybe my limit wasn't large enough (wasn't 2147483647 though was still "big") or maybe I messed up something else and it didn't work.
