Using Bash History More Efficiently: HISTCONTROL

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Article Source Linux Journal
July 15, 2009, 8:15 am

 

Using the HISTCONTROL variable you can control how bash stores your command history. You can tell it to ignore duplicate commands and/or to ignore commands that have leading whitespace.

When working at the command line we often end up executing some commands multiple times. The default history size is 500, too many duplicates of the same commands can fill up your history and leave you with a less then useful history. You can of course increase the size of your history list using HISTSIZE or HISTFILESIZE…

 

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