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Comment by idupree | Hacker News Reader

"While $HISTORY is great, it only retails a certain amount of data."

Unless you have HISTSIZE=100000000; SAVEHIST=100000000 or some such nonsense (-hides-). Using Ctrl-R for history doesn't seem to be slowed down at all by my huge histfile. There are privacy implications if you're hacked/subpoenaed, but it's hella convenient.

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You're probably aware of it, but anyway... Put

    HISTCONTROL='ignoreboth:erasedups'

In your .bashrc - now duplicate commands (two consecutive commands that were the same) are not included in HISTFILE, and also if you type " some-sensitive-command username password host" (note the extra space at the beginning), they too won't be include in HISTFILE.

http://serverfault.com/q/48769

http://serverfault.com/q/241154

Mine is set _somewhat_ ridiculously large. Just not that large. And it seems like it just gets to be obscene at some point.

Every few months I wipe out all of the `ls`, `clear`, `cd` and similar entries from my history file. Usually knocks the size down by a decent double-digit percentage.

the history size becomes a bit smaller if you add: export HISTCONTROL="ignoredups"

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