Learning the bash Shell, Second Edition

The History File

All of bash’s command history facilities depend on a list that records commands as you type them into the shell. Whenever you log in or start another interactive shell, bash reads an initial history list from the file .bash_history in your home directory. From that point on, every bash interactive session maintains its own list of commands. When you exit from a shell, it saves the list in .bash_history. You can call this file whatever you like by setting the environment variable HISTFILE. We’ll look more closely at HISTFILE and some other related command history variables in the next chapter.