How to View bash shell history and Change bash history file size in Ubuntu

July 29, 2010 · General, Server ·

Sponsored Link
The Bash shell is the default shell environment in most Linux distributions, including all flavours of Debian. One default feature of the Bash shell is to record a history of all the commands entered by a user in a log file called .bash_history, found in the user's home directory.
View user bash history in Ubuntu

First open up a terminal from Applications > Accessories > Terminal and type the following command

history

This will show you all your terminal commands history on the terminal

If you want to save this history in to a file use the following command

history -w ~/userhistory.txt

Once you have save the file you can view using the following command from your terminal

gedit ~/userhistory.txt

Change bash history file size

If you want to change bash history file size open up your .bashrc using the following command from your terminal

gedit ~/.bashrc

Now add the following line at the top

export HISTFILESIZE=3000

Save and exit the file

As you can see, the limit can be changed.

Bash shell keeps it’s own history in a file. You can view that file as stated before, or by opening ~/.bash_history.

Sponsored Link

←
→

3 Comments to “How to View bash shell history and Change bash history file size in Ubuntu”

  1. Anxious Nut says:
    July 29, 2010 at 6:27 pm

    I think you have to do “source ~/.bashrc” after that!

  2. davidc says:
    July 30, 2010 at 2:16 am

    Good tip. I like to search thru history with ctrl-r inside bash – type a few chars and use ctrl-r again to cycle thru results.

  3. dvorka says:
    January 19, 2014 at 2:01 pm

    You may want to give a try to https://github.com/dvorka/hstr that allows even more convenient shell history navigation and management.

Leave a Reply

←
→

  • Recent comments