Re: How to enable infinite command history

[Pierre Gaston]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 8:01 PM, Ivan Yosifov <iyosifov@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I got an admittedly basic question but I'm really at my wits' end with
> this.
>
> How do I enable infinite command history ?
>
> One simple suggestion I've seen online is to set HISTSIZE and
> HISTFILESIZE to a large number. This is not what I need, I want
> genuinely unconstrained history file growth.
>
> Another idea I've seen is to unset HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE. This
> doesn't seem to work, the history file is being cropped to the default
> of 500 lines.
>
> I'm probably missing something obvious but any help is appreciated. I'm
> running Bash 4.1.5 (Debian Squeeze).

I don't think there is a way.
But do you plan to use bash normally?
Setting HISTFILESIZE to 2147483647 gives you 68 years of history at
one command per seconds
(I hope I got my math right)
with say 5 chars per commands it's something like 5GB of history.