I have used the Unix bash shell for many years. As I am incredibly lazy and forgetful, I have become accustomed to using ctrl-r ‘find’ to find and scroll though the latest ‘find’ commands I have issued.

Occasionally, I noticed that a lengthy, complex, useful ‘find’ command’ (which I mercilessly plagiarised from a clever person via Google) was no longer in my shell history.

Investigations revealed the default bash history is a paltry 1000 commands so I decided to increase this to 10000 by adding the following line to ‘~/.bash_profile’.

HISTFILESIZE=10000

After all, disk space is much cheaper than my time.