Shell history not long enough? Try this

Our current CI-setup adds some noise to the bash history file. This is like 200 extra commands a day (automated) but this flushes a part of the history. Normally the history is only 1000 records long. The problem with the extra 200 commands a day is that i only keep around 5 days of history. This annoys me. On OSX Catalina this is even worse since the new zsh shell is only keeping track of the last 15 or so. I upped it to 10k because thats what I needed, use accordingly.

Here are some guidelines to fix this issue.

In Linux edit ~/.bashrc and add the following lines.

HISTSIZE=10000
HISTFILESIZE=10000

In MacOS before Catalina edit ~/.bash_profile and add the following lines.

HISTSIZE=10000
HISTFILESIZE=10000

MacOS Catalina uses zsh so please edit ~/.zshrc

HISTSIZE=100000
HISTFILESIZE=10000

Please restart your shell after this, and use the following commands to see the results.

echo $HISTSIZE $HISTFILESIZE $HISTFILE

Output should be something like this on OSX:

10000 10000 /Users/xxx/.bash_sessions/sessionID.historynew

Happy history-ing!