bash history for current session

Maybe I’m overlooking something but is there a way to get your current bash history for the current session you are using like

if i run

ssh host
$ pwd
$ ls
$ cd /tmp

I just want to see those 3 commands and nothing else

Answers:

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Method 1

A slightly roundabout way:

history -a ~/current_history

This will save the current session’s unsaved bash history to ~/current_history, which you can then view.

Method 2

I had the problem that I wanted to write the current history to a file but still wanted the entries to be recorded in the main bash history

I solved this by just attaching the file with cat:

history -a current-history
cat current-history >> .bash_history

Method 3

You use history -a with a filename. This can be a device-file, like /dev/stdout.

Then you can pipe that however you like. For example, to view your current session history in less you can

history -a /dev/stdout | less

Method 4

Use comp to compare the entire history (incl. current Bash session) with the already persisted history in .bash_history and only print those lines that are unique to the current session — which should show only those commands that were executed since starting the current Bash shell

comm -23 <( history | cut -c 8- ) ~/.bash_history

Edit: as @Wildcard pointed out this command does not work for all distributions of comm. I tested this on Mac OS.

A variation of the same idea using diff:

diff <( history | cut -c 8- ) ~/.bash_history | sed -n 's/^< //pg'

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0