Terminal constantly missing some history

Often, I use some command in the (GNOME) terminal, quit, and on next launch, I attempt to find the command I used, only to find it’s missing. Sometimes it misses an entire sequence of commands I used, other times might be just a single one. I’m not using 2 terminal tabs at once, and I only quit after the command is completed. What is happening?

Does the echo $HISTIGNORE command print anything?

Nope, prints an empty line…

This could happen if the session terminates abnormally.

  • Use only Ctrl+D or exit to terminate the session.
  • Avoid using graphical window controls or window manager shortcuts to close the terminal window or its tabs.
  • Always explicitly exit the shell before closing the graphical session.
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The permissions for ~/.bash_history should be
-rw-------

Is the file in your home dir damaged?

Could be this, I’ve always used the close button to quit, I’ll try the command line.

Yeah, stat shows this permission. I can open .bash_history and read its lines, though it’s missing some commands I used.

set | grep -i histsize

A discussion on this problem could be found here

Which shell program do you use? Some shells omit commands with a leading space from history (one use case).