Comments on: Use multiple tabs in Linux or OS X without losing your history

By: Robert Goldman

Robert Goldman — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:19:04 +0000

One thing that might be even better would be to be able to save *separate* histories for multiple shells. I typically have as many as 8 different terminal windows open at once. I think it would be great to have separate histories and, even more, separate directory stacks (I use pushd and popd a lot) for each of the terminal windows. Somehow, though, you’d have to be able to have a terminal window “know” its identity, and then when restarted (I use KDE) somehow find the same identity. If you could do that, it would be simple to associate separate histories and directory stacks with separate shell instances.

By: thinux

thinux — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 03:00:27 +0000

great, i am annoyed by this problem for a long time.

By: Martin McCallion

Martin McCallion — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:56:53 +0000

Excellent! You might be interested to know that it also works in Cygwin Bash (not surprisingly).

By: mightybs

mightybs — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 07:58:50 +0000

For anyone wanting to keep any default, or previously defined PROMPT_COMMAND you'd want to use something like this:

PROMPT_COMMAND="${PROMPT_COMMAND}; history -a;"

This way you can keep the previously set PROMPT_COMMAND, by redefining PROMPT_COMMAND with itself and adding on your desired commands.

Ed:Great suggestion Brett - I've added it to the article. Thanks!