How to stop Bash appending history

Question

I am having a lot of trouble setting up the terminal history of Bash the way I want.

I would like to have no duplicate entries and if I enter a command I want it saved and the duplicates above removed.

The problem is the history command shows me it is functioning the way I want however once I log out the duplicates come back again. I believe it is just appending the history to the existing one.

I have these lines in my .bashrc file (~/.bashrc)

HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth:erasedups
shopt -u histappend

I have even tried uncommenting shopt but it still appends the history on logout.

How can I have the history be exactly how it is before I logout?

Solution: You can create a .bash_logout file (~/.bash_logout) with the following content:

history -a
history -w

This writes the current history that is in memory to the .bash_history file and then removes duplicates before you logout.

Answer 1

You can create a .bash_logout file (~/.bash_logout) with the following content:

history -a
history -w

This writes the current history that is in memory to the .bash_history file and then removes duplicates before you logout.

(Adding this as a solution so it is no longer a zero-answer question)