Shell history not being written to specified history file

[Peter Nikitka]

Hi,

remove the default historyfile and retry again - perhaps this helps.

mfG Peter

[Scott Lindstrom_2]

Brett - I am having the *exact* same problem on only one of our servers. Did you ever get a resolution?

I have checked all the items in this thread and nothing seems to be causing the problem.

Scott

[Bill Hassell]

> date>>$HISTFILE

I believe that this is the problem. The POSIX shells (like ksh, HP's sh, bash, etc) create specialized binary file for the shell history. 99% of the file is ASCII but there are binary codes scattered throughout the file. The first 2 characters in a .sh_history file are SOH (CTRL-A or 0x01). You can see the effect when you edit .sh_history with vi (to remove traces of a mistake). Once edited, the history command (or fc -l) reports blank line numbers in the file. It appears that deleting or adding a line corrupts the file.

This problem comes up when trying to add a timestamp to the shell history file.

[Dennis Handly]

>Bill: I believe that this is the problem.

Didn't I say that above? :-)

[Scott Lindstrom_2]

Let me try converting to the "print -s" method. While we have printed the datestamp directly to the file for years I can see how that could/would corrupt the file.

But would that cause the system to write history to .sh_history rather than whatever is in $HISTFILE? (A rhetorical question I guess).

[Dennis Handly]

>Scott: But would that cause the system to write history to .sh_history rather than whatever is in $HISTFILE?

I'm not sure, why would the shell would check the file for validity?
Are you exporting HISTFILE at the top of ~/.profile? Does /etc/profile cause any history to be written sooner?
The documentation isn't clear when you can change/export it.

[Sundar G]

Brett,
It works perfectly in my Itanium, 11.31 server, but "what /bin/ksh" shows a different date, "B.11.31 Oct 1 2008 01:54:10".

Might be bcause of the version