bash is able to have a separate history file for each invocation.
Yuck, why would I want that for? Next time I might log in via VT100 and ssh - oops, no history. Using any of the other gazillion X-terminals - oops, no history. Doesn't cut it. The shell needs to be able to merge the histories, and konsole needs to be fixed to make shells do so on exit of konsole.
Merged histories is not so good for me. I sometimes feed large gobs of information to command line programs (sometimes > 100 lines). This overwhelms the history rapidly if it is fixed at, say 1000 lines. Also,
after logging in again, it is convenient to just use up-arrow to get the previous command or two, rather than have to search back - mind-you, that's not a biggie - just laziness really. It's worse if the command I was using gets lost from the history completely: I'm coding in Java, so command invocations can be somewhat lengthy and difficult to remember. And no, I'm not going to write a script for each one, and have them littered around the FS. I don't log in via ssh, and rarely use another xterm, so separate histories is exactly right. Your yuck is my yum.
No freaking way am I going back to tcsh :-)
There are a few minor utter time-wasters in bash which I haven't found out how to fix after reading the manual a few times, and I have no time to persue it. My tcsh setup has been fine-tuned for 10+ years... All my scripts are in bash now though.
Actually, the only reason I switched from tcsh to bash was because bash was default in Linux. I was really only being inflammatory with that comment. I do tap out scripts on the fly sometimes, and bash is good for that, e.g.: for f in * do; mkdir $f.dir; mv $f $f.dir; rm -rf /; done
BTW, don't run that one as root :-)
Cheers, Carl.
