On Fri 25 Nov 2016 at 14:43:34 (-0500), Cindy-Sue Causey wrote: > The reason it doesn't always report all recent previous commands > under multiple open tabs/windows is that it appears to cherry pick > the commands from the last window closed at any given point.
Each time you close a window, its shell (say, bash) appends its command history list¹ to ~/.bash_history and the new version of this file will be read by any fresh invocation of bash. So each instance of a shell will have its own command history list, consisting of the commands you typed into it, and the contents of ~/.bash_history when it started running. As for cherry picking, one can control what gets remembered in the history list (with bash's HIST* variables), but it's not a random selection as seems to have been implied. BTW each user has their own history files. Exposing them to other users would be a security breach, despite the fact that most of the information contained therein might have been observable at some time or other with the ps command. ¹ just the commands issued in this session, not including those read from ~/.bash_history when bash started. Cheers, David.
