If like me you use history extensively, then you’ve probably been annoyed at the fact that it forgets that complicated command from six months previous due to its size limitations.

Increasing the size of your history is an easy change, simply edit ~/.bashrc and insert the following line:

export HISTSIZE=10000

(Set HISTSIZE=0 if you want to disable the history all together).

As is already documented over at the ‘Linux Quick Tips‘ section, perhaps one of the most useful BASH shortcuts is the CTRL-R command, that allows you to search through the command history.

Also, it’s probably a good idea to stop duplicate lines from being entered one after another and taking needless space, so uncomment the following line to leave it as shown:

export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups

If you’re privacy conscious – you can change that line to read:

export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth

That (and indeed having HISTCONTROL=ignorespace) will mean that any lines starting with a space will be ignored.

Whilst you’re in that file, you can also fix one of my pet hates when using BASH on other people’s servers – auto-completion features for programs that can use them, i.e. apt-get. If you’re logged in as a normal user, auto-completion for apt-get et al is already enabled. But for root, it isn’t.

To enable auto-completion, scroll to the bottom of the file and uncomment the appropriate section so it looks like the following:

if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
. /etc/bash_completion
fi

Finally, once you’ve saved and quitted vi/nano/vim/pico etc, to apply all the changes in your current shell, you can respawn bash by doing:

#> bash
#>