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I want to have a complete and sorted list of my bash history. But there are some problems:

  1. By doing history the list never shows the complete list and only 1000 commands are shown.
  2. In my $HOME directory there is a file named .bash_history that shows 2000 results.

  3. When I want to make a sorted .txt file out of my history I do:

    history | sort > History.txt

    But because of numbers the commands are not sorted alphabetically and are sorted by number.

Is there any way to do what I want?

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2 Answers 2

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sort can sort input by the field specified by the user to -k, so strictly speaking something like this would be what you are looking for.

history | sort -k2 > History.txt  # or -K3 if you have $HISTTIMEFORMAT, etc set

Additionally, there's often a difference between what's available in the output of history command vs what's recorded in ~/.bash_history in that the latter is not updated after every command (is usually updated only on logout), so using history | sort .. is better at giving you a current view.

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How about:

cat ~/.bash_history | sort > Sorted_history.txt

to have an unlimited bash history, have a look at this QA:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9457233/unlimited-bash-history

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  • 3
    and if you don't want exact repeats, you could "cat ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq > Sorted_history.txt"
    – jpezz
    Jun 3, 2018 at 19:46
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    @jpezz: or more simply < ~/.bash_history sort -u > Sorted_history.txt. And you can use history -a first to "append history lines from this session to the history file".
    – Peter Cordes
    Jun 4, 2018 at 5:05
  • history | cut -c 30- | sort -u -i | ack "ssh" will (for me) cut off the variable parts (time codes and indexing) and then sort. I do get some duplicates, I think because of different whitespace. Pipe it through "ack" as shown to get simple searching.
    – pbhj
    Jun 5, 2018 at 15:07

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