Curated Bash History

I use a static, curated history of commands in my shell. The idea is simple: whenever I open a new terminal window, Bash comes preloaded with a fixed history of commands, which I have manually collected over the years and which I update every so often. I currently have 195 commands in my history file.

Doing this is so much better than the standard behavior that I feel stupid for all the years I spent not doing it!

For some time, I just changed the permissions of ~/.bash_history so that Bash would never write to it. Then one day I took the time to RTFM and just added this to my ~/.bashrc:

history -r $HOME/.static_bash_history
HISTFILE=/dev/null

The first line reads my curated history into the current shell's history, and the second ensures that changes to the history won't go anywhere.

Here are the advantages I gained:

I know for sure that typing Ctrl+R ffmpeg Enter always runs the same command. This means I can safely memorize fragments of commands and then quickly and safely get to them.
The history is never polluted, I always know exactly what's there.
I don't need a huge history file just to make sure that important commands don't get erased.
I can version control my history in a meaningful way.
There were a few times in the past when Bash simply lost my history. This doesn't happen anymore.

Some tips:

New items should be added to the beginning of the list, so that Ctrl+R works predictably.
Protect the bottom of the list with a comment or something like echo, so that Up Enter doesn't do something unexpected.
Also protect the top of the list for PageUp Enter.

Some thoughts:

I still have access to the history of the current shell.
This doesn't replace having scripts properly stored in separate files, but this does mean you can have simple code in the history.
Maybe I have to do this only because Bash sucks? I don't know.
I'm sure other people have thought of this before.

2025-03-11