Environment & Shell Customization (Aliases/Functions/.Bashrc)

Stop your terminal from being a graveyard of duplicate history entries

🧩 The Challenge

Opening a new terminal window only to find your up-arrow key is a scrolling nightmare of the exact same command repeated ten times makes me want to pull my hair out. It’s like the shell is trying to bury my actually useful commands under a mountain of redundant `ls` and `cd` calls.

💡 The Fix

Tweak your shell environment settings to ignore duplicates and suppress commands that start with a space, so you only keep the stuff that actually matters. It cleans up your history file massively.

export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth:erasedups
export HISTSIZE=10000
export HISTFILESIZE=20000
shopt -s histappend

⚙️ Why It Works

Setting ignoreboth handles the space-prefix trick and duplicates simultaneously, while histappend prevents your multiple terminal sessions from nuking each other’s history when they close.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Add a space before your command to keep it out of the history entirely if you’re typing something with a password.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 7/18/2026