Bash Code to backup the history file in Linux [closed]

Question

How is the logic, efficiency and can it be improved?

This is a snippet from my .bashrc file, I just wrote it.

The code is supposed to do this:

Backup my .bash_history file if it is 1000 lines or less from the defined size of HISTSIZE=100000 and HISTFILESIZE=100000 lines, then backup the file.

1. Check if .bash_history is 99000 lines or more.
2. Check if ~/.bash_history.old exists if it doesn't use that filename.
3. Increment i one digit larger than is already used by filenames.(filename-4.old)
4. Check if there are more than 20 files already backed up and warn if it is.
5. Set the new filename into a variable.
6. Check if the last file with a digit in it's filename is older than the original.
7. cp the file to new_name

Here is the code:

# Count the number of lines in `/.bash_history and check if it's equal or more than a thousand
if (( $(wc -l < ~/.bash_history) >= 99000 ))
then
    name=~/.bash_history
    # Here is the suffix of the new files and the ones I check for
    old=.old
    # -e FILE ==> True if FILE exists.
    if [[ ! -e ~/.bash_history.old ]]
    then
       printf "%s\n" "##################################################" ".bash_history will be cleared soon, backing up....!" "##################################################" 
       # Here I copy $name which is ~/.bash_history and create backup file
       cp $name ~/.bash_history.old
    else
        # i is the increment in the filenames to be checked and created
        i=0
        # $name$old is ~/.bash_history.old
        if [[ -e $name$old ]]
        then
            # Here I count how many copies there are with digits in the filename
            while [[ -e "$name-$i$old" ]]
            do
                let i++
            done
        fi
        # if there are 20 files already backed up then I need to archive them somewhere else
        if [[ "$i" -ge 20 ]]
        then
            printf "%s\n" "********************************************************" "You need to arhive your history files they are mounting up!!!" "**************************************************************"
        fi
        new_name=$name-$i$old
        minus=$(( i - 1 ))
        if [ $name -nt "$name-$minus$old" ]
        then
            printf "%s\n" "##################################################" ".bash_history will be cleared soon, backing up....!" "##################################################"
            cp ~/.bash_history "$new_name"
        fi
    fi
fi

This is the result from shellcheck.net:

Line 16:
                let i++
                ^-- SC2219: Instead of 'let expr', prefer (( expr )) .

Answer 1

First, logrotate is a tool built to do exactly this sort of thing. I would recommend using that to achieve the effectively the same extremely reliably and with lots of configuration options. That said, some suggestions on the code as written:

• ShellCheck is great; I would recommend following its recommendation to use (( i++ )).
• wc -l counts the number of lines, not bytes or kilobytes, which seems to be what you want.
• old, minus and i are not helpful names; I have to read and understand all the code in the context in order to understand what they mean.
• It looks like you only ever replace the last of the 20 files once you have 20 backups.
• You have five instances of ~/.bash_history, even though one of them is the value of a variable. I would pull that variable out and reuse it everywhere.
• Use More Quotes™ - it's good for you and the code.
• Rather than a special unnumbered backup file (~/.bash_history.old), why not just start numbering the backups immediately? That way you can get rid of at least two checks for whether that file exists ([[ ! -e ~/.bash_history.old ]] and its inverse, [[ -e $name$old ]]).