How to: Unlimited Bash/shell history?

Question

Is there a way to define an unlimited history in Bash ?

Answer 1

put that into .bashrc:

export HISTFILESIZE=
export HISTSIZE=

There you go, unlimited history. Currently I have 27000 entries :)

From "man bash":

 If HIST‐FILESIZE is not set, no truncation is performed.

That means .bash_history is never truncated

Also the same seems to apply to HISTSIZE, although I couldnt find that documented.

Another neat feature I'm going to try is this:

If the HISTTIMEFORMAT variable is set, time stamps are written to the history file, marked with the history comment character, so they may be preserved across shell sessions.

Let me know if you have tried that already...

Answer 2

Have you googled it?

Go into your .bash_profile now and add these lines

HISTFILESIZE=1000000000

HISTSIZE=1000000

Linux Tips: take control of your bash_history

Answer 3

A different concept (may not be applicable) but you can have unlimited history when using shell-sink.

Answer 4

Yeah I don't think there is any way to have an 'unlimited' history, but doing as aioobe says should do the trick (although you may put it in .bashrc, either way would be fine) then simply restart bash or do source ~/.bashrc and check with set | grep HIST