TL;DR: If your history begins to truncate (e.g., your HISTSIZE is 400 but your history number is 500), resetting your history with history -c will clear HISTSIZE or fewer lines from your history, and subtract that many from your history number, but will not reset it to 0 (in the example, it would reset it to 100). How can I completely reset the history number back to 0?
Bash 4.2 (and also on 4.4). I want my history numbers to be under 4 digits. relevant bashrc sections:
HISTSIZE=99
HISTFILESIZE=100
#ignores back-to-back duplicate commands, not those that start with a space
HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
#ignore commands fewer than 5 characters long because we can type those
HISTIGNORE="?:??:???:????:?????:history"
the history number as seen with history or \! in the PS1 will obviously go beyond these values. I want to be able to reset the history number down to ~100 when it goes above 1,000.
history -c clears the terminal history, but that only reduces the history number by the amount of commands that it cleared, e.g.:
j:~$ history | wc -l
99
j:~$ echo $HISTFILESIZE
100
j:~$ echo $HISTCMD
1203
j:~$ history -c
j:~$ echo $HISTCMD
1106
So... how do I drop the history number down to a smaller number, such as $HIST(FILE)SIZE. This is in a tmux session, but I don't think that should matter.
Aside: is there a method to get the current history number as a variable that requires fewer pipes than the one I'm currently using? EDIT: as Jeff mentioned, $HISTCMD stores this value.
None of the solutions provided work. Here's what they do with set -x:
$HISTCMD, unless it's been unset. – Jeff Schaller Aug 16 '18 at 17:02\#and one is\!. One changes withhistory -cand one doesn't – jeremysprofile Aug 16 '18 at 21:55HISTFILESIZE=$HISTSIZE. – Aug 26 '18 at 22:33