Bash History and Tab Completion

when you log in the first time bash reads:

• /etc/profile
• .profile (if exists in home dir)
• .bash_profile (if exists in home dir)

non-login shells read:

• .bashrc (if it exists)

If you want to increase your history size put this in your .bash_profile:

export HISTSIZE=1000

You may want to also put that in your .bashrc for subsequent shells from your login shell, because this value will not be set until you log out and back in again. You can also issue export HISTSIZE=1000 in the shell to increase this, but value will not be set for any other or subsequent shells started from your session.