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I routinely run multiple screen sessions on my Linux desktops and servers.

A problem with this is that when I grep through my command history, I find I issued a command in a different session, and have to detach and re-attach to get that history item.

Is it possible to 'force' the differently-updated histories from multiple sessions to all go to a central history?

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I ran into a similar issue whereby I was not able to view history between terminal sessions. Turns out my ~/.bash_history file was owned by root and not writable. Changing owner/group to my user fixed the issue: sudo chown <user>:<group> ~/.bash_history – mateo Nov 25 '11 at 13:14
similar: stackoverflow.com/questions/103944/… – lesmana Dec 3 '11 at 9:20
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There are two things you need to do:

  1. Insert the command shopt -s histappend in your .bashrc. This will append to the history file instead of overwriting it.
  2. Also in your .bashrc, insert PROMPT_COMMAND="$PROMPT_COMMAND;history -a; history -n" and the history file will be re-written and re-read each time bash shows the prompt.

EDIT: Thanks to e-t172 for the history -n trick

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Thanks for this. I improved it further using PROMPT_COMMAND="$PROMPT_COMMAND;history -a; history -n". This way, commands issued in other sessions immediately appear in the history of the current session (well, you need to press Enter first to update the history). – e-t172 Sep 8 '09 at 10:41
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This is wonderful! Thanks for the tip! – Nighthawk Sep 10 '09 at 12:27
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I didn't have PROMPT_COMMAND defined previously, so I had to use PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a; history -n" to avoid errors. – William Jackson Jun 2 '11 at 14:53
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