HISTCONTROL=erasedups

[Thilo Six]

Hello

Today i came across this neat feature but unfortunately i have a problem with 
it.

~/.bashrc
<----------------------------
export HISTCONTROL=erasedups
---------------------------->

$ history
    1  history

$ top
$ htop
$ top
$ htop
$ history
    1  top
    2  htop
    3  history


i close this shell and open a new terminal:

$ history
    1  top
    2  htop
    3  history

$ top
$ htop

i close this shell again and *now* i get:

$ history
    1  top
    2  htop
    3  top
    4  htop
    5  history

So it seems to me entries already written to ~/.bash_history are not
"eliminated".
Is this the supposed behaviour?

man bash:
<---------------------------------------------------------------
A value of erasedups causes all previous lines matching the current line
to  be  removed from the history list before that line is saved.
--------------------------------------------------------------->

>From that i would think only *one* appearance of entries that are the same
would be saved.

please give me a hint.

TIA Thilo
-- 
i am on Ubuntu 2.6 KDE
- some friend of mine

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