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History command is not working in a non-interactive SSH command from another Linux machine

May 30, 2023

I have a little quirk with my Linux machines and I suspect it’s due to the fact that I define my history file in my .bashrc file like this:

export HISTFILE=~/.history

From another machine I like to run a non-interactive ssh command to see things I’ve done on that other machine. I often like to see the history of commands on some other machine so I run something like this, using a predefined SSH configuration for the other machine named "vps" in this example:

ssh vps "history"

and I get no response.

I can run

ssh vps "ls -al"

or any other command and see the results, but the history command is the only one that doesn’t work.

If I run this I can see the environment that I’m getting from the non-interactive shell:

$ ssh vps "env"
SHELL=/bin/bash
HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:erasedups:ignorespace
HISTSIZE=5000
PWD=/home/myname
LOGNAME=myname
XDG_SESSION_TYPE=tty
MOTD_SHOWN=pam
HOME=/home/myname
LANG=C.UTF-8
HISTFILE=/home/myname/.history
XDG_SESSION_CLASS=user
USER=myname
SHLVL=0
XDG_SESSION_ID=1167
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1002
PATH=.:/home/myname/.local/bin:/home/myname/.cargo/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin
HISTIGNORE=&:ls:ll:l:lt:la:h:hh:pwd:exit:..:duh:duh2:cd
HISTFILESIZE=5000
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/1002/bus
_=/usr/bin/env

My .bashrc has these things along with some other aliases:

PATH=.:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH
shopt -s checkwinsize
shopt -s cmdhist
shopt -s cdspell
shopt -s histappend
shopt -s histverify
export HISTFILE=~/.history
export HISTIGNORE="&:ls:ll:l:lt:la:h:pwd:exit:..:hh:h *"
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:erasedups:ignorespace
export HISTSIZE=5000
export HISTFILESIZE=5000
alias h='history'
alias hh='history 50'
alias hgrep='history | grep '
alias hr='history | sort -rn | less '
alias ll='ls -Aoh'

My .bash_profile is the usual:

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
       . ~/.bashrc
fi

>Solution :

history is disabled by default for non-interactive Bash. You can do like this:

ssh host 'set -o history; history'

# or

ssh host 'HISTFILE=~/.history; set -o history; history'

# or

ssh host '. ~/.bashrc; set -o history; history'