8ball-media

When often using the terminal you don’t want to type certain commands over and over again. Although recent commands are stored in the .bash_history in your home-directory they will be overwritten at some point when a new terminal is opened. So you won’t be able to use Ctrl + R to search for commands you’ve typed longer time ago. Luckily there is an option to append the terminal commands instead of overwriting them.

$ shopt -s histappend

Add this command to your ~/.bash_profile and you’ll never lose a command anymore. As a side effect the .bash_history file will grow over time as well as be poluted with a lot of redundant commands. So i wrote a little ruby script to keep the ~/.bash_profile commands unique. Here we go..

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# Ruby 1.9.2 
# encoding: utf-8
 
# This little script keeps the entries in the ~/.bash_history file unique
# Might be useful when working with: $ shopt -s histappend 
#
# author   david linse (david@8ball-media.de)
# version  0.0.1
 
history_path = "/Users/#{ENV['USER']}"
history_file = ".bash_history"
 
history = File.join history_path, history_file
 
entries = Array.new
uniques = Array.new
 
begin
  file = File.open(history).each do |line|
    entries.push line
  end
rescue
  abort "\nError! could not find: #{history} ..\n "
end
 
uniques = entries.uniq
removed = (entries.size - uniques.size).to_s
 
output = File.new(history, "w+")
output.write(uniques)
output.close
 
file.close
 
msg = ''
msg << "\nBash History Uniquifier\n\
Removed #{removed} entries from #{entries.size}, \
now #{uniques.size} in #{history}\n "
 
puts msg

You can use and/or modify it to your own needs. Maybe there is someone of you who’s running Ruby on an Windowz machine and could implement an appropriate modification and post it back.. ?

That’s it, more simple ruby stuff to come.. Thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment.

Kindest

Update: I added some error handling for the case the history does not exist.