Logrotate your bash history file

A while ago I decided to take more control over my bash history and I followed this advice https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/48113 .

With time I’ve tweaked few settings, like ignore lines that start with space, and ignore some of the trivial commands like ls:

export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:erasedups:ignorespace     # no duplicate entries & lines starting with space
export HISTSIZE=99999999                                # big big history
export HISTFILESIZE=99999999                            # big big history
shopt -s histappend                                     # append to history, don't overwrite it
export PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a; history -c; history -r; $PROMPT_COMMAND"  # Save and reload the history after each command finishes
HISTIGNORE='ll *:ls *:l:gs:'                            # ignore some commands

Nevertheless, every now and then I’d loose the command history, e.g. when upgrading the distro. I then discovered logrotate . It’s a brilliant and easy to use tool for, guess what, log rotation!

In order to rotate your .bash_history file simply create a new logrotate config file: /etc/logrotate.d/bashhistory:

/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.bash_history {
    weekly
    missingok
    rotate 5
    size 5000k
    nomail
    notifempty
    create 600 YOUR_USERNAME YOUR_USERNAME
}

and you’re golden. From now on, when all conditions are met, logrotate will create an empty ~/.bash_history and append current date to archived file, e.g. ~/.bash_history-20190513.