How to disable editing my history in bash

Question

In bash, when I go back in history, edit some command and run it, this edited command is appended to history and the original one is left intact. But every once in a while I somehow manage to affect the original command, i.e. my edit replaces the original command back in history. I can't put my finger on how this happens.

Can someone explain? My goal is to avoid this, so any edit to a previous command always gets appended to history and never replaces the original.

Answer 1

I somehow manage to affect the original command, i.e. my edit replaces the original command back in history.

Right. If you go back in your history and edit the line without pressing return to execute the command but instead moving to another history entry, you've just edited the history entry. If you then list your history, you will see a * on the line indicating that you edited it. I find this "feature" immensely frustrating. Others have provided good examples of how to reproduce this.

My goal is to avoid this, so any edit to a previous command always gets appended to history and never replaces the original.

I too wanted to disable it. I found the solution via this answer over on unix.stackexchange.

To summarize, you need to enable the revert-all-at-newline readline setting which is off by default. If the setting is on then bash will revert any changes you made to your history when you execute the next command.

To enable this setting in your shell, you should add the following to your ~/.inputrc file and then restart your shell:

$include /etc/inputrc
set revert-all-at-newline on

The first line is needed because I guess that if you supply your own .inputrc file the default /etc/inputrc file is not included which is probably not what you want.

Answer 2

If you go back to some previous command and edit it, but then DON'T execute it (instead using history commands to go to some other command and execute it), then the edits will remain there in your history list.

Pressing Ctrl + C, after editing, counters this behaviour. It leaves the original command in tact i.e. it cancels remembering edits to the original.