Arch Linux

bhe69

Member

Registered: 2024-01-11

Posts: 13

Bash ignores erasedups

Hello,

I've taken the option "erasedups" from the Arch Wiki on Bash: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bash#H … tomization
It should remove any duplicate entries in bash history. My current .bashrc looks like this (most of it is default, LANG and HISTCONTROL were added by me.

#
# ~/.bashrc
#

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
[[ $- != *i* ]] && return

alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
PS1='[\u@\h \W]\$ '

# https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bash#History_customization
export HISTCONTROL="erasedups:ignorespace"

export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

However my .bash_history still looks like this:

sudo pacman -Suy
yay -Suy
sudo pacman -Suy
yay -Suy
sudo pacman -Suy
yay -Suy
WINEPREFIX=~/wine winecfg 
cat .bashrc 
WINEPREFIX=~/wine winecfg 
sudo pacman -Suy
yay -Suy
cat .bashrc 
xed .bashrc 
sudo pacman -Suy

Why is bash ignoring the erasedups command? I'm using gnome-terminal, but that shouldn't make any difference. New commands are added to bash history, but duplicates never removed.

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,083

Re: Bash ignores erasedups

You may be misunderstanding what that option does,

Try executing the same command 5 times in a row, then check how many times it is shown in history .

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bhe69

Member

Registered: 2024-01-11

Posts: 13

Re: Bash ignores erasedups

You may be misunderstanding what that option does,

https://man.archlinux.org/man/bash.1#HISTCONTROL says:
A value of erasedups causes all previous lines matching the current line to be removed from the history list before that line is saved.
This is what I want: Remove previous identical lines from the history.

Try executing the same command 5 times in a row, then check how many times it is shown in history .

If I don't close the terminal it is show only once in history. If I close the terminal, it will appear once for each try.

xed .bash_history
sudo pacman -Suy
etc-update 
sudo etc-update 
xed .bash_history
xed .bash_history
xed .bash_history

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: Bash ignores erasedups

This is what I want: Remove previous identical lines from the history.

And that's what you're getting: they are removed from the active process history - but it does not edit the already archived HISTFILE content.  Though if you do not have histappend set, this file should get overwritten.  What's the output of `shopt | grep histappend`?

Last edited by Trilby (2024-07-04 20:46:36)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

bhe69

Member

Registered: 2024-01-11

Posts: 13

Re: Bash ignores erasedups

Though if you do not have histappend set, this file should get overwritten.  What's the output of `shopt | grep histappend`?

histappend seems to be off.

$ shopt | grep histappend
histappend     	off

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: Bash ignores erasedups

Hmm, in that case it does seem to be not working as documented.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman