[ILUG] bash/tcsh/4nt history

[John Gaughan]

On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Caolan McNamara wrote:
> For my sins I work a little with 4nt under nt on occasion and 
> it has a history feature that 50% of the time drives me crazy
> and 50% of the time is quite handy. All running copies share
> the same history buffer. Type a command in a window and 
> it appears as the last command in all windows history.
> 
> Probably wouldn't be too hard to add it to bash/tcsh with a
> bit of ipc jiggerypokery.
> 
> tcsh has a merge facility which when the various shells exit 
> then the histories are merged and sorted according to timestamp,
> and bash has an append facility which sounds similiar. But of
> course this only happens at exit time not during execution.
> Does it sound useful to have a single shared history file
> during execution of multiple shells ? I'm of two minds, but
> could be a fun option to play with.

Zsh will do this (and ksh as Jerry Connolly has mentioned).  usually
find this annoying I don't use it.  You can enable it by putting the
following commands into your ~/.zshrc:

 setopt sharehistory      # Enable shared history between shells
 HISTFILE=~/.zsh_history  # The file for storing history events
 SAVEHIST=100             # The max number of events saved in $HISTFILE
 HISTSIZE=100             # The max number of events saved in the
                          # internal history list.

There's also a bunch of options for controlling what gets added to the
history list.  You can get a description of them by searching for 'hist'
in the zshoptions manpage.

John.

-- 
John Gaughan, Systems Administrator
Irish Times New Media - http://www.ireland.com/