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jvriesem
jvriesem

Reputation: 1972

BASH: Is there a way to automatically save recent lines to my bash history during a period of inactivity?

The .bash_history file is a life-save for many of us. Unfortunately, BASH only seems to save the commands of a session when that session is closed (via exit).

It's a tragedy, then, when all your commands from an important session are vaporized when a session is closed unexpectedly -- before it gets to archive all the commands with fancy syntax that took hours to get right....

This happens to me when I forget to close a SSH connection when leaving work, and it gets disconnected due to inactivity (Write failed: broken pipe), or when I restart my computer without closing my terminals manually, and so on.

I would love to have my BASH commands archived after some interval -- say every 10 minutes -- so that if I do close a session, my commands will still be there. This seems like something a lot of people might find useful.

Does anyone have an idea of how to do this?

Ideally....

StackOverflow-ers -- consider yourself challenged!

Upvotes: 8

Views: 3633

Answers (2)

olejorgenb
olejorgenb

Reputation: 1328

According to this bash will (usually) receive a SIGHUP on disconnect.

Using trap we can write the history (lame as #*?! that bash doesn't do it by default though..):

function rescue_history {
    history -a
}
trap rescue_history SIGHUP

Put the above in your .bashrc

Upvotes: 4

user3620917
user3620917

Reputation:

You can use history command with -a option:

history
-a     Append the ``new'' history lines  (history  lines  entered  since  the
       beginning of the current bash session) to the history file.

You can write each and every command to history file at once with a little help of PROMPT_COMMAND function:

PROMPT_COMMAND
If set, the value is executed as a command  prior  to  issuing  each  primary prompt.

So just put this into .bashrc

PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a"

Upvotes: 13

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