How to increase your .bash_history size a.k.a. what to do when you suffer from short term command line syntax loss

vi ~/.bashrc add HISTSIZE=1000 (default is 500 on most nix) then source ~/.bashrc echo $HISTSIZE To see the old size echo $HISTFILESIZE

If you really want to get tricky you can set your .bash_history size REALLY high and then use logrotate to make sure you don’t fill up your hd. See here: http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/SuSE/2008-12/msg00864.html