bash history not recording failed or erroneous commands

Question

I used to be able to use up and down arrow to find my history, including failed commands that did return a different retval, correct them and try again. After I installed fzf something changed, and now I only have successful commands in my history which return a value, everything else simply isn't there.

I suspect I've either changed something in one of my script configs, or fzf changed something:

• .bashrc
• .fzf.bash
• .profile
• .bash_profile

Unfortunately this is extremely annoying and I've no idea how to fix it. For example, typing:

which python
sudo apt-cache

produces in .bash_history:

#1601901660
which python

but not the sudo apt-cache command.

Running the following command:

 grep HIST ~/.bashrc ~/.profile ~/.bash_profile ~/bash.login ~/.bash_aliases /etc/bash.bashrc /etc/profile /etc/profile.d/* /etc/environment .fzf.bash 2>/dev/null

Produces:

/home/tons/.bashrc:HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
/home/tons/.bashrc:HISTSIZE=
/home/tons/.bashrc:HISTFILESIZE=
/home/tons/.bashrc:export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%h %d %H:%M:%S "
/home/tons/.bashrc:export HISTSIZE=10000
/home/tons/.bashrc:export HISTFILESIZE=10000
/home/tons/.bashrc:export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace:erasedups
/home/tons/.bashrc:export HISTIGNORE="ls:ps:history"
/home/tons/.bashrc:export HISTIGNORE="s*"

Answer 1

The HISTIGNORE variable is a way of telling bash's history system to ignore certain commands. Here, you are setting that to:

export HISTIGNORE="s*"

Note that this will overwrite the earlier HISTIGNORE="ls:ps:history". More importantly, this s* tells bash not to store any commands starting with s in the history, which nicely explains why your sudo apt-cache isn't stored: sudo starts with an s.