<p><pre><code>  $ history |wc -l
  82230
</code></pre>
This is just from my work machine (~4 years old), my history is not centralized but after seeing all this I think I&#x27;m going to work it into my centralized dotfiles system.<p>Also, I can confirm that gigantic bash histories don&#x27;t affect the speed of anything.<p>Super useful&#x2F;essential tweaks -<p><pre><code>  export HISTCONTROL=erasedups
  export HISTSIZE=&quot;NOTHING&quot;
  export HISTFILESIZE=&quot;NOTHING&quot;`
  shopt -s histappend
  export PROMPT_COMMAND=&#x27;history -a;echo&#x27;
</code></pre>
erasedups will erase any earlier instance of an indentical command, keeping your history file lean.  Setting HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE to something nonnumeric makes for no limits.  histappend appends to the HISTFILE when the shell session exits.  And my prompt command appends each executed command to HISTFILE immediately after it&#x27;s executed.  With histappend, this may be redundant.  (The prompt command also gives me a blank line after each command finishes.)<p>That mysql setup is pretty cool too, it&#x27;s a rich man&#x27;s<p><pre><code>  $ history | awk &#x27;{print $2}&#x27; | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10
  14365 vi
  11006 sudo
   6976 ls
   6898 svn
   5322 cd
   3869 cdb
   2809 svnvimdiff
   1846 ggrep
   1474 git
   1285 ssh</code></pre>