I keep a pretty long bash history, but I don't have it unified among machines or anything. Others have mentioned several handy tweaks for doing this, but I did

I keep a pretty long bash history, but I don't have it unified among machines or anything. Others have mentioned several handy tweaks for doing this, but I didn't see all of the ones I use so I thought I'd share them here. One of the important bits is the HISTIGNORE. I am interested in commands that I might want to search for and run again one day, so I filter out commands I consider to be clutter. # Configure my history preferences # Load history substitute into readline rather than immediately executing shopt -s histverify histreedit set histappend # don't put duplicate lines or lines with leading spaces in the history. See bash(1) for more options export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth export HISTIGNORE='&:bg:fg:cd*:clear:ls:pwd:history:exit:make*:* --help:' export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%m/%d/%y - %H:%M:%S "