Command History Storage: enabled but not working :(

MrPete

I'm getting all the signs that command history storage ought to be working:

.keephistory file in place
On login it tells me it's working, and how to clear it
There's even a growing pile of .history.<timestamp> files

Unfortunately:

all of those files are empty
on next login, the command history is gone

How to diagnose this?

stephenw10

Sounds like you may not be exiting the sessions cleanly so it never writes the history out. Is that possible? I've hit that before when just rebooting or pulling the power.

Steve

MrPete

@stephenw10 Interesting... in my context, almost every "exit" is most definitely not-clean:

Connecting through SSH, and leave the connection up... and it gets killed every once in a while
Connecting through a virtual web console. Same thing.

Is there any way to trigger an every-n-minute save? Or even a manual save?

stephenw10

I'm not aware of it if there is. Certainly there's no pfSense config for that.

I would try exiting normally and reconnecting just to prove that is the issue before going to deep down that rabbit hole.

Steve

MrPete

@stephenw10 Turns out this is a known and long-festering issue for admins across the board. How to have multiple shells open, all generating history?

Some shells support fancy stuff like eliminating duplicates... but here's the best I have found for pfSense:

Edit ~/.tcshrc and replace

set history = 1000
set savehist = (1000 merge)

with

        set history = 1000
        set histdup = erase
        set savehist = (${history} merge lock)
        alias precmd 'history -S'
        alias postcmd 'history -M'

So far it works very nicely:

Saves history after every command
Merges multiple shell histories together