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

[ewx.livejournal.com]

You wouldn't have thought it was that hard to write a little history management library that did the right thing. Might be trickier persuading shell maintainers to integrate it...

I think you'd need the following operations:

• Use the following history file
• Give me the N most recent history items as an array of strings
• Add these lines to the history
• Get/set the maximum history size
• Err ... that's it?

Any number of processes can use any of the operations in any order and it's still safe. It'd have to be safe over NFS too, which might be more entertaining.

There'd also be little command, again using this interface, to separately set the history size, for integration with applications that lacked a convenient way to configure it.