Some pretty .bashrc hints

This covers some nice to know bash tips that in my opinion every user should know of.

Do not remember a command you typed in a few days ago and can not find it because it has already been removed from your .bash_history? Then it is time to increase the number of lines bash keeps in its history file.

Code Listing 1: ~/.bashrc

// # Keep 1000 lines in .bash_history (default is 500)
export HISTSIZE=1000
export HISTFILESIZE=1000

Note: To find commands in your history easily use the ctrl+r shortcut to reverse-search your .bash_history as you type.

If you want to stop bash from creating a history file simply add export HISTFILE=/dev/null to your .bashrc.

Another nice tip is to put export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups into your .bashrc that will stop bash from caching duplicate lines.

From: http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20041004-newsletter.xml