We're running bash on a system monitored through AIDE and whenever a new shell is run for root it will trigger AIDE due to a change in ctime for '.bash_history'. It seems that history_truncate_file() will trigger multiple chown() calls even though the history was neither written nor needs truncating. Unfortunately this modifies the inode's ctime even when the new user and group ids are the same.

The attached patch tries to fix this by checking whether the history file actually needs updates to the ownership before calling chown().