CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macos
marciokoko
marciokoko

Reputation: 4986

macos catalina bash shell not saving history

Last night I went into my bash shell in terminal and entered a few commands. Then today I go in but theyre not saved in the history (arrow up). However the really old commands I used about 5 or more months ago are there, so the history is not empty.

Why is my history no longer activated and how do I activate it?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3112

Answers (4)

Tim Long
Tim Long

Reputation: 2149

I solve the problem for myself as follow:

  1. Check which shell is running: echo $SHELL It should return /bin/bash. Otherwise my solution not applied.

  2. Backup .bash_profile with: mv .bash_profile .bash_profile.bak

  3. Close your shell with CMD + w.

  4. Reopen Terminal to check if bash history works, by typing some commands, then using arrow up to check

  5. If terminal history seems to work again. Then the cause of the error lays down in the .bash_profile. If you want to keep your .bash_profile, you should comment out each of the command in there, to find out which commands cause the problem with the Terminal history.

In my case, the cause was commands of my working place related to cloud tooling.

I hope to help someone out! Best

Upvotes: 0

lofihelsinki
lofihelsinki

Reputation: 2571

macOS Catalina uses zsh as your shell, so your shell settings go to ~/.zshrc

Edit your settings:

nano ~/.zshrc

Add these lines to your ~/.zshrc file:

HISTSIZE=100000
HISTFILESIZE=999999
SAVEHIST=$HISTSIZE

The historycommand in zshalso shows only 16 most recent lines from the history file unless you give it the start line as a parameter:

history 0

This will show you the whole history.

You can make an alias for this, so that the history command without the parameter will show the complete history as well:

Add this line to your ~/.zshrc file:

alias history="history 0"

Upvotes: 5

DEADBEEF
DEADBEEF

Reputation: 21

I switched from zsh to bash in OSX Catalina but the shell history wasn't saving. I had success fixing that by creating the ~/.bash_profile file and putting this inside:

export SHELL_SESSION_HISTORY=0

Got the idea from this older thread: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/218731/why-bash-history-on-my-mac-wont-save

Upvotes: 2

Ricardo Ramirez
Ricardo Ramirez

Reputation: 33

Since macOS Catalina Apple's default shell is no longer bash, but zsh. Therefore your sources will no longer come from your .bashrc or .bash_profile.

If you want to bash to be your default shell follow this steps:

System Preferences > Users and groups > right click on your user and select advance options. > On the Login Shell drop down menu select your prefered shell.

Hope this helps!

Upvotes: 0

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