On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 09:44:34AM +0200, Matej Vargovčík wrote: > I had a problem losing bash history when switching between terminals in > tmux. I reported the issue in tmux, but the developers have told me that > it's a bash problem and I should report it here. Please see this thread for > more details: > https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1671 > Thank you for looking into this matter
Each running instance of bash keeps its own copy of history in memory. When you use the "history" command, or the up-arrow key, or any other methods to review bash history, you get the list from that particular instance of bash. Bash loads history from the $HISTFILE on disk into memory at startup, and writes history from memory into $HISTFILE on disk upon exit, unless you use "history -a" or similar commands to modify the $HISTFILE while bash is still running. If you're looking for a real-time shared history among all concurrent running instances of bash, there are ways to hack that into existence with "history -a" and $PROMPT_COMMAND and so on. But I'll warn you that Korn shell does that real-time shared history thing, and I despise it. I greatly prefer bash's isolated history, where each window can operate independently without unrelated work flows bleeding into each other. Or worse, if you're logging into a shared account (say, root), with ksh you might accidentally get some other person's commands in your history. With bash, at least you know you're always getting YOUR history. No surprise rm -rf * commands.
