I am a packrat, but I do like a bit of order. This makes maintaining my bash history difficult. There are some commands that I use frequently that seem to fill up my history file making it hard to keep some of the lesser used, yet very important commands in the history. Finally sick of the problem, I poured over the manpage for bash and found the section on HISTCONTROL. From the description there, I found that this along with HISTIGNORE, I can almost eliminate my problem of my bash history getting too full of stupid common commands.
I added this to my ~/.bash_profile:
export HISTIGNORE="&:ls:[bf]g:disown:cd:cd[ ]-:exit:^[ t]*"
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:ignorespace:erasedups
export HISTFILESIZE=2000
Here is the snippet from the bash manual that corresponds to these controls:
HISTCONTROL
A colon-separated list of values controlling how commands are saved on the history
list. If the list of values includes ignorespace, lines which begin with a space
character are not saved in the history list. A value of ignoredups causes lines
matching the previous history entry to not be saved. A value of ignoreboth is
shorthand for ignorespace and ignoredups. A value of erasedups causes all previous
lines matching the current line to be removed from the history list before that
line is saved. Any value not in the above list is ignored. If HISTCONTROL is
unset, or does not include a valid value, all lines read by the shell parser are
saved on the history list, subject to the value of HISTIGNORE. The second and sub-
sequent lines of a multi-line compound command are not tested, and are added to the
history regardless of the value of HISTCONTROL.
HISTFILESIZE
The maximum number of lines contained in the history file. When this variable is
assigned a value, the history file is truncated, if necessary, by removing the old-
est entries, to contain no more than that number of lines. The default value is
500. The history file is also truncated to this size after writing it when an
interactive shell exits.
HISTIGNORE
A colon-separated list of patterns used to decide which command lines should be
saved on the history list. Each pattern is anchored at the beginning of the line
and must match the complete line (no implicit `*' is appended). Each pattern is
tested against the line after the checks specified by HISTCONTROL are applied. In
addition to the normal shell pattern matching characters, `&' matches the previous
history line. `&' may be escaped using a backslash; the backslash is removed
before attempting a match. The second and subsequent lines of a multi-line com-
pound command are not tested, and are added to the history regardless of the value
of HISTIGNORE.