Bash tips and tricks

Concatenate two arrays

Let's say I have two arrays:

myarray1=( '1' '2' '3' )
myarray2=( '4' '5' '6' )

what I want is to get a third array containing the content of the first array and the content of the second one. This is the equivalent of python's extend function. The syntax to do this is (as often in bash) horrible:

myarray3=( ${myarray1[@]} ${myarray2[@]} )

To test that it worked:

echo ${myarray3[@]}

The Linux documentation project has a nice page on bash arrays

Change history settings

Set the number of commands remembered

To make sure bash does not remembers everything you type, you should set the exact number of commands you want to be remembered. This is described by the HISTSIZE environment variable. For example, to set the size to 20, put the following line in your .bashrc:

export HISTSIZE=20

You can also set the number of lines in your history file (.bash_history by default) using the HISTFILESIZE variable.

Make bash forget some commands

You can make bash not log some commands using the HISTIGNORE variable. It contains a comma-separated list of patterns that should be ignored.

A nice trick is to ignore all commands beginning with a space:

export HISTIGNORE='[ ]*'

This way when I do not want bash to log a given command, I just preceed it by a space.

References