Re: Bash History Behavior Suggestion

[Martin D Kealey]

"Missing/disappearing history" is entirely down to the lack of "writing
history as you go", and yes that would be reasonable to offer as a new
opt-in feature.

As for separation of sessions, I strongly suspect that anything between
*total* separation and *none* will result in so many ugly compromises that
in the end almost nobody will be happy with it. So if there's to be an
additional option - which I'm not convinced of - I suggest that it simply
be to set HISTFILE by default to either
$HOME/.bash_history.d/{some-pattern-here} (if the directory exists) or
~/.bash_history (matching the current behaviour when that directory does
not exist). I would recommend that the pattern include most or all of $$,
$TTY, $LOGNAME, and $((EPOCHSECONDS-SECONDS)).

Lastly, an awful lot of "default behaviour" is down to whatever
/etc/skel/.bashrc and /etc/bash/bashrc that are shipped with Bash by the
various distros. Maybe Bash should start shipping some kind of "standard
library" of functions that are *expected* to be included with any distro,
but are not actually built into the binary.

-Martin

PS: complaining about "inelegant" in relation to Bash seems a bit pointless.

On Tue, 20 Aug 2024 at 16:48, <support@eggplantsd.com> wrote:

> I wouldn't consider dozens of stackoverflow/askubuntu/etc complaints of
> missing/disappearing history "cherry-picked".  There were far more than
> I sent.
>
> I understand not wanting to pull the rug out from under people, but the
> kludges Kealey posted were inelegant.  An opt-in for the suggested
> behavior would be good enough.
>
> JS
>
> On 2024-08-20 2:17 am, Lawrence Velázquez wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 20, 2024, at 1:42 AM, support@eggplantsd.com wrote:
> >> The suggestion is that the default behavior needs some work
> >
> > The default behavior is unlikely to change.  For every cherry-picked
> > example of someone unsatisfied with it (bugs aside), there is likely
> > someone else who prefers it as is (or at least would not appreciate
> > it changing out from under them).  New shopt settings may be doable.
>
>