home ¦ Archives ¦ Atom ¦ RSS

Bashing History

GNU’s Bash is my command language interpreter of choice. I can’t even remember when I started using it. But I probably only use about 1/10th of its capabilities.

Chanced across this discussion of effective use of Bash’s history mechanism by Jason Bechtel and learned a couple of things. The HISTIGNORE environment variable is a new feature to me. This is the foundation of a neat trick, whereby if you put a space in front of a command then it doesn’t get added to your command history. Handy for leaving out the trivial ls, cd, and, for me at least, pushd executions that litter my command usage.

Also, I was completely ignorant of the shopt command. Learn something new every day.

© 2008-2024 C. Ross Jam. Built using Pelican. Theme based upon Giulio Fidente’s original svbhack, and slightly modified by crossjam.