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Bash was written when disks were a few megabytes. It’s trivial to tell it to keep an infinite log, as others have commented.
by gumby 3y ago
Bash was written when disks were a few megabytes. It’s trivial to tell it to keep an infinite log, as others have commented.
- hnlmorg 3y agoThe issue isn’t the length of the history. It’s that the history is written to at the end of the bash session. So if you have multiple sessions open then one session with overwrite another session log. Even if your point was right though, I’d argue that because Bash is still being maintained, any defaults originating from the 80s should be updated. Yes, I know there are low footprint environments out there that still have writable storage in the region of a few megabytes (or even less), but we have other shells for those use cases.
- gumby 3y agoChanging defaults can have unexpected consequences, especially ones that have storage implication and especially in programs that are so tied to scripting. I agree that the default is unfortunate but the points above seem more important.
- hnlmorg 3y agoChanging bash history retention wouldn’t affect scripts. Scripts don’t write to the history log. And bash has already changed numerous features over the years.