How to append to bash history before showing the prompt if the line isn't a duplicate?

Question

Because it seems often the history isn't saved when shutting down and not closing gnome terminal, I'd like to append to bash history before showing the prompt if the line isn't a duplicate. Although I have export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth in bashrc, which is supposed to imply ignoredups, it doesn't seem to work, as I still get duplicates in bash_history. So how to do this?

To offer further indications, although not solutions: I think $PROMPT_COMMAND needs to have "$(history 1)" (if_not_duplicate) >> ~/.bash_history

And this would remove non-adjacent duplicates, if they are already inserted.

perl -nei '$H{$_}++ or print' ~/.bash_history 

Answer 1

You need to modify both PROMPT_COMMAND and HISTCONTROL to do this right. The following should work for you:

# The secret sauce is "erasedups," which replaces the default of "ignoredups."
export HISTCONTROL=erasedups:ignorespace

# Write the history to HISTFILE before showing the prompt.
export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -w'

Two caveats to consider with this approach are:

1. You will lose history (specifically duplicate entries), which may matter if you rely on HISTTIMEFORMAT values for anything.
2. You will continuously truncate your HISTFILE to HISTFILESIZE.

These aren't necessarily problems, just minor issues you should be aware of.