CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macosterminal
Ruben
Ruben

Reputation: 826

Mac Terminal history - commands with past results

I have been working with two terminal windows in my Mac (dev/prod), both had shown the commands and results history (scrolling up) for the last 6 months of work, which was very helpful to run periodic commands and to check past errors.

Yesterday I turn off my mac and closed both terminal windows manually, but today when opening the terminal it has no history at all. There is a way to recover the windows with all the history for past commands and their results?

I know there is a .bash_history file but it only shows commands typed but not the results.
Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 9371

Answers (2)

user1689987
user1689987

Reputation: 1546

if using zsh check your /etc/zshrc for the history file location, mine has

# Save command history
HISTFILE=${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zsh_history
HISTSIZE=2000
SAVEHIST=1000

also check your ~/.zshrc incase the defaults for these have been changed

Upvotes: 1

James
James

Reputation: 4681

Bash's history only store executed commands, not their output, and only a limited number of them (usually 500, as defined by environment variable HISTFILESIZE). This won't help in your situation.

From what I can see, it appears that Terminal store save window's state (including console history) inside directory /Users/<user>/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.Terminal.savedState/. Files in this directory are modified in real time whenever new events occurs in the terminal window, and unless I am mistaken, should be included in Time Machine backups. Therefore, it seems that if you can restore files in this directory from some former backup, you should get back your history. You could even try some "file undelete" tools in that directory, though these tools are rather rare on OS X.

The procedure for this should be that you first quit Terminal, then restore the whole directory (for example using Time Machine), then simply launch Terminal. These saved state files use a custom binary format, that you can't be read otherwise than by the Terminal program itself.

By the way, it might be worth mentioning that you can, at anytime, save the content of a Terminal window to a text file, from the Shell menu. You might consider doing it periodically, in the future, given that your terminal's history appears to have some significant value...

Upvotes: 2

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