bash history in OS/X Terminal

I've noticed a few annoying things about the way Terminal in OS/X handles history.

• It truncates history back to 500 entries if you open multiple sessions
• It seems to ignore some commands, which never quite make it into history.
• It appears not to pay attention to variables like HISTSIZE

Today I opened the file at /private/etc/bashrc_Apple_Terminal and discovered that this is all because of the way sessions are handled.

I added the following to my ~/.bash_profile to change the way history and sessions are handled in Terminal.

export HISTSIZE=100000
export HISTFILESIZE=200000

# see /private/etc/bashrc_Apple_Terminal
export SHELL_SESSION_HISTORY=0 # share a single history between term sessions
`touch ~/.bash_sessions_disable` 

I don't mind disabling sessions, since I always close out all my Terminal windows when I'm done with them. But, I'm sure you can figure out your own best configuration if you read through the contents of /private/etc/bashrc_Apple_Terminal