Bash script of history command redirection to a file in a docker container

Question

So i have this script that works fine in my host machine

#!/bin/bash -i
history > history.txt

but when i execute it in my docker container my history.txt looks like this : (it copies my script into the file and if i re-execute the script it does the same thing again !)

1  #!/bin/bash -i
2  history > history.txt

by the way when i execute "history > history.txt" directly from the terminal it works fine .

Answer 1

With bash -i , executed lines are logged in the history. You execute lines from your script, therefore the lines from your script show up in history.txt .

You can see this at the end of your history on the host as well:

$ tail -n 2 history.txt
29419  #!/bin/bash -i
29420  history > history.txt

In a clean Docker instance there is obviously no previous history, so those two lines are all you get:

$ tail -n 2 history.txt
    1  #!/bin/bash -i
    2  history > history.txt

There is no way to directly access your bash history outside of Docker from inside, so if that's what you want to do, you should dump it to a file first, and then give Docker access to this file.