Re: Problems with history

X-seq: zsh-users 30411

From: Perry Smith <pedz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

To: zsh-users@xxxxxxx

Subject: Re: Problems with history

Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:23:19 -0600

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I figured it out. Note to Mark: my “login file” is my .zlogin file — and that’s the key. It is read at login time but not by an interactive subshell.

If I do normal login / commands / logout I’m ok. But I often drop into an interactive subshell because I’m going to change my path temporarily or something similar. In that case, my .zlogin is not read but /etc/zshrc is read which sets HISTFILE, HISTSIZE, and SAVEHIST. In particular SAVEHIST to 1000. Then I exit the subshell and my .history file gets truncated to 1000.

It takes a little extra work but now if I start a login shell it gets just 1000 lines of history. If I then exit my original shell before this new shell, the new shell leaves last and thus truncates the history file short at roughly 1000 lines with no shells left running.

I goofed — trying to minimize what is done with each shell. The key is “history” is part of interactive — not login.

Thak you for your time

On Dec 15, 2025, at 14:37, Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, Dec 15, 2025 at 8:18 AM Perry Smith <pedz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

/bin/zsh —version reports zsh 5.9 (arm64-apple-darwin25.0)
/opt/homebrew/bin/zsh —version reports zsh 5.9 (arm-apple-darwin22.1.0)
I’m assuming Terminal uses /bin/zsh

You could `print $ZSH_PATCHLEVEL` from the PS1 prompt to confirm

When is the history file read in?

Pretty much the last thing before the prompt is printed, definitely after all the startup files are read UNLESS one of those files contains an "fc" or "history" command.

Does setting HISTSIZE or SAVEHIST cause the current history list to get truncated?

HISTSIZE truncates the shell's internal history list, yes. SAVEHIST won't kick in until the history is written back to HISTFILE.

Is there any other things I should check?

As an addenda to Mark Reed's comments, you could try printing the values of the history variables in your .zlogout file (follow that with a `sleep` so you have a chance to see the output).

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