It's my understanding that the history file is updated when the terminal exits. But sometimes my computer crashes out, and the terminal doesn't exit cleanly, and then I lose those commands from my history which is annoying. How can I make it flush immediately, so that the entries still go there even if my computer has a meltdown? At the moment I'm using this workaround, but I feel there should be a better way.
I'm using gnome-terminal on Ubuntu 12.10.