.sh_history for root?

[John Stiles]

Hi all,
dumb question. How do you get .sh_history to work
for root? running 11i now, never had to set it before. it works for all users except root.

Thanks,
John

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi

Set it in .profile.

See other users .profile for how.

Paula

[Helen French]

I would put these two entries in the root profile file - /.profile:

HISTSIZE=4096
HISTFILE=/.sh_history

[Massimo Bianchi]

Hi,
remember also the

export EDITOR=vi

line, in addition to the others !

and the logout/login, better from another terminal, just in case you made the wrong change and are not being able to login...

HTH,
Massimo

[Enrico P.]

Hi,
in root' s .profile

export HISTFILE=/.sh_history
export HISTSIZE=100

Try

touch /.sh_history

. ./.profile

Good luck

Enrico

[Pete Randall]

John,

We put these entries in /etc/profile so that root and all other users get history access:

HISTFILE=/tmp/.sh_history.$(whoami)
export HISTFILE


Pete

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

From /etc/profile

HISTFILE=$HOME/.sh_history
HISTSIZE=5000

This will implement it for all users.

Its important to save lots of data, especially for root. It helps me remember commands I don't use often and track down mistakes made by other people.

SEP

[Fragon]

I always set HISTSIZE as large as possible to keep more history commands!
Some boxes have more than one root user, when there are some problems, we can review the .sh_history to check what's the wrong operation!
Fortunately, very small .sh_history can keep much history commands!!!!!!

-ux

[John Stiles]

Thanks all!

I used the /etc/profile method. works great.
added the following lines:
# add history stuff. 6/25/03 js.
HISTFILE=$HOME/.sh_history
HISTSIZE=5000
export HISTFILE

The confusing part for me was that it worked for users but not root. Nothing about history in user .profile, but it is in the .cshrc file for users even though user set to use ksh, it seems to be picking up the settings in .cshrc file.

Thanks for the help.
John

[Pete Randall]

John,

You should be exporting HISTSIZE as well!


Pete

[Geoff Wild]

Just an enhancement...

If you have multiple admins who sign in as root, and you want to track them separately, then this is what we do:

# Set up logging
HISTFILE=${HOME}/.sh_history_`who am i|awk '{ print $1}'`
date >>$HISTFILE
export HISTFILE
HISTSIZE=500
export HISTSIZE

This creates a root history file for each person who su - to root.

Rgds...Geoff

[Armin Kunaschik]

And just a simplification to the enhancement:

HISTFILE=~/.history_$LOGNAME

Far better to understand and faster...

Armin

[Bill Hassell]

One of the 'features' of the POSIX shell (unlike ksh) is that the .sh_history file is not created automatically. So even though HISTFILE has been set, the $HOME/.sh_history file must already exist (touch $HOME/.sh_history). The file is created automatically for normal users.