On 28 April 2012 22:38, Peter Gueckel <pgueckel@gmail.com> wrote:

I read about a shell variable called HISTIGNORE that is supposed to prevent duplicate
commands from occurring in .bash_history.

I put the following line into ~/.bash_profile:

export HISTIGNORE="&"

It's not working. I still have duplicate commands galore. Why isn't is working?

HISTIGNORE only deals with consecutive duplicates, IIRC.

What you want is:

export HISTCONTROL=erasedups

you might also want to add ":ignorespace" to the end of that. That will cause any command prefixed by a space to be ignored as well - very useful for those long commands that you will only ever run once!

Regards,

--
Andy

The only person to have all his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe