post-diluvian shells

[fivemack]

Is there any shell which maintains an at-all-sensible command history when you're working with several terminals each with half a dozen sessions in tabs? Intercalating the history from multiple sessions would probably be ideal for my current working style; appending the history from each session as a lump when the session closes would also be fine; but at the moment tcsh seems to maintain history for at most one session, randomly-selected, and this makes 'history' less than useful if I actually want to work out what I've been doing.

Comments

[arnhem.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't dream of doing anything that sounded remotely like recommending that someone start or continue working with the csh or its derivatives, but have you noticed the bit of the manual that asserts that the "savehist" shell variable can contain two words - the first, if set to a number, says how many lines should be saved in the history file; the second, if set to "merge" causes the history list to be merged with the existing history file instead of replacing it, and sorted by time stamp.

It does note, depressingly, that this only works "when the shells quit nicely one after another", so I suspect that the quite common behaviour of killing an X session resulting in a whole bunch of shells quitting almost simultaneously will just result in corrupted history files ...

Worth trying

set savehist="10000 merge"

as a quick fix, allowing for the fact that there are known failure modes?