sync write to .bash_history file?

[Gianluca Cecchi]

Hello,
I remember "my" plain old days (1995) when working on HP-UX typing on DCE
terminals connected by MUX to the Unix host...
At that time there were several guys using the same administrative root
account at the same time with the Korn shell... and you had a synchronous
write to the history file, by default .sh_history.
I was at my first steps on the Unix/Linux world: I remember trying to
install a Slackware  3.0 bought by Yggdrasil and asking about support for
Matrox in X Windows System to the kernel list and in about a couple of hours
getting an answer with two possible solutions, directly from Alan Cox... and
the one I tried worked like a charm, obviously... ;-)

Ok, come back to today days....

I see that in Linux, on Fedora, but in general with some flavours and
distros, it seems that write operations to the .bash_history are not
"consistent", in the sense that sometimes you will not find all the commands
in it..... and sometimes they are not aligned (a sort of .swp file effect
like in vim...?)
Is there a particular reason?
Is there a possible configuration giving a consistent and synchronous fill
of this file? Eventually eliminating cache things if this could be the
cause...

I know that the correct general approach is to go without administrative
accounts and only using personal ones and something like sudo to escalate
privileges, but in certain cases it could be useful in my opinion to have
this.

Ok, during old days and proprietary Unix systems one could run something
like

HISTFILE=/tmp/foo
export HISTFILE


and go on... but all in all you still got the first comand...
Or one could tamper with the .sh_history file with a direct edit....

Just to know in what Linux is different with them and if able to change its
default behaviour

Thanks in advance,
Gianluca
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