[flyaway123]

Comment from the author:

"Ted, the change I suggest doesn't affect the independence of your sessions as you suggest. Each shell maintains a unique history in memory so modifying the history file has no affect on running terminals. The only time the history file is read is when you start a new terminal. I recommend you try my suggestion. Really, all I am doing is eliminating the race condition that causes the bash history file to have inconsistent data.

Thanks for the feedback."

[cstrahan]

Exactly this.

If you do want to load the history persisted from other shells into the current one, all you have to do (if memory serves) is:

    $ history -r