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Comment by dtgriscom | Hacker News Reader

I often have three or more terminals open, doing different tasks in each; I also often have cycles of work where I'll repeat the last three commands again (three up-arrows and a return). This breaks if one terminal's commands get inserted into another terminal's history.

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Comment from the author:

"Ted, the change I suggest doesn't affect the independence of your sessions as you suggest. Each shell maintains a unique history in memory so modifying the history file has no affect on running terminals. The only time the history file is read is when you start a new terminal. I recommend you try my suggestion. Really, all I am doing is eliminating the race condition that causes the bash history file to have inconsistent data.

Thanks for the feedback."

Exactly this.

If you do want to load the history persisted from other shells into the current one, all you have to do (if memory serves) is:

    $ history -r

My solution is I immediately record the commands, but do not load them. That way new terminals get all the history, but old terminals keep their flow.

But if you go back later, the chains of commands from different terminals are interlaced right?

To some degree; it depends on the amount of multitasking. I mainly care about which commands in which order when I'm looking at recent commands from that terminal; otherwise I use C-r.

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