Today I finally decide to make a script to keep my bash_history synchronized among all the machines I use. It’s a simple script that retrieves all the .bash_history files from all my machines, merges all the files into one, sort it, removes the duplicated lines and write it back to all the machines. The only drawback is that the original ordering of the history files is lost due to the alphabetical sorting step (needed to remove the duplicated lines).
WARNING: Make sure that your history file size limit is big enough to hold all the combined history files. Otherwise you’ll lose some of the entries. You can go to this post for reference on how to change the history file limits
Here’s the script:
echo copying local history file history -a cp .bash_history full_history HOSTS="machine1.example.com machine2.example.com" for i in $HOSTS; do echo copying history file from $i scp $i:~/.bash_history tmp_history.txt cat tmp_history.txt >>full_history wc -l tmp_history.txt wc -l full_history done echo sorting the new history file and removing duplicates sort full_history|uniq >uniq_history rm full_history echo replacing history file with the new one mv uniq_history .bash_history echo reloading bash history from file history -c history -r wc -l .bash_history for i in $HOSTS; do echo backing up .bash_history in $i DATE=`date '+%Y%m%d%H%M%S'` ssh $i "cp ~/.bash_history ~/.bash_history$DATE" echo replacing .bash_history in $i scp .bash_history $i:~/.bash_history done
