How to Persist Terminal History?

Basic Help & Support
#1

Firstly, it seems ArchLabs uses ~/.zshrc, correct? Does it also use bash?

This post says to use shopt, but i’m getting “not available”.
shopt -s histappend

What’s the correct way on Arch?

Thx!

#2

You can change your shell to bash if you want.

Change default shell

#3

Have you tested that it doesn’t already work?

Fairly sure it’s set up to do this already.

#4

i would not like to change the default shell to bash-- would like to get persistent history with zsh.

You mean persistent history, without putting a shopt command in the rc file? Def not working for me.

#5

shopt is not used in zsh, option command here is setopt

Have you removed the default shell configs? If not then it is indeed enabled already, check ~/.zsh/settings/options.zsh

You should find something like

# history
setopt share_history append_history extended_history

If not then add it to your ~/.zshrc and you’ll have shared history. I also suggest reading man zshoptions

2 Likes
#6

are there supposed to be multiple entries?

setopt hist_verify share_history append_history extended_history
setopt hist_ignore_dups hist_save_no_dups hist_ignore_space
setopt inc_append_history hist_ignore_all_dups hist_expire_dups_first

#7

Cuz i found those 3 lines in the config file.
i replaced them with your line.
still not getting persistent terminal history.

By “persistent”, i mean it remembers history between logins.
Any ideas?

thx

#8

Fixed.

Seems archlabs default .zshrc is missing SAVEHIST and HISTFILE (although it has export HISTSIZE… and export SAVEHIST…

HISTSIZE / SAVEHIST are zsh-internal parameters, exporting them makes no sense

#9

bug report:

#10

is this correct format?

export HISTSIZE=1000
export SAVEHIST=1000
export HISTFILE=$HOME/.zsh_history