Bash is losing history even though shopt -s histappend is set

I lost all commands that were executed from the last session - they do not show up in history at all. What needs to be done to prevent this??

I had added

shopt -s histappend

just for this purpose .. but it is either not taking at all or at the very least not reliably.

~/spark >shopt | grep histappend
histappend on

2 Answers

Following combination seems to be working:

unset HISTFILESIZE
HISTSIZE=10000
PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a"
export HISTSIZE PROMPT_COMMAND
shopt -s histappend

Check permissions in the .bash_history file (and its parent)

Sometimes this is deliberately changed to prevent history from being used (and potentially capturing things like passwords in the command line)