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I am writing an script to dump my history log into another file "myhistory.log", and then clear that history. I have written the following set of commands:

date >> myhistory.log

history >> myhistory.log

history -c

Everything goes well except that the previous history is not cleared. I have tried the following variations: 

\history -c

and

CLRH="history -c"
exec $CLRH

What I am missing probably??

Radu Rădeanu
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Ambuj Mani Tripathi
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  • It may seem a duplicate but my motive to ask the question was to learn how to specify the option while writing scripts. The history was just the example, as I stated in the title. – Ambuj Mani Tripathi Mar 27 '14 at 07:14
  • You complained the fact that history is not cleared. And I think that you are falling into [XY problem](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem). If so, you can [edit](http://askubuntu.com/posts/439785/edit) your question and make it clear. – Radu Rădeanu Mar 27 '14 at 10:26
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    I read your original post and still don't understand what you are asking. What options are you talking about? Do you want to know why the `history` builtin acts differently in scripts? Please [edit] your question and clarify. – terdon Mar 27 '14 at 15:34
  • The problem was that the last statement in the script "history -c" was clearing the history temporarily so I used "> ~/.bash_history" after "history -w" command. Now it is correct. Thank you all for the support. – Ambuj Mani Tripathi Mar 28 '14 at 13:08

1 Answers1

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By default, for bash, the command history are stored in ~/.bash_history file.

As an alternative you can do this:

#!/bin/bash
date >> ~/myhistory.log
cat ~/.bash_history >> ~/myhistory.log
echo -n "" > ~/.bash_history

This will append to ~/myhistory.log (if the file is already there, else create a new file and write to it) the date when the script was run, dump your history, and clear the ~/.bash_history file.

rusty
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