Xterm does not saved all executed commands
 

As the title says Xterm does not seem to save all previous executed commands. Usually in terminal you can press the up arrow and scroll through previous command to save typing it all again. Xterm seems vert hit and miss saving some and missing quite alot. Anyone else have this or have found a work around?

Re: Xterm does not saved all executed commands
 

I think this is down to the use of ash as the default shell. One option is to install bash, and configure user to use it. It works for me. Its in one of the extras(-foo) repos somewhere, all usual caveats apply.

Re: Xterm does not saved all executed commands
 

Thanks I will give it a bash..... No pun intended lol
Cheers

Re: Xterm does not saved all executed commands
 

Chances are your history is set to a small number and its only saving the last 10 commands or so - you can tweak that in your profile.

Re: Xterm does not saved all executed commands
 

It's possible that your .ash_history has the incorrect permissions/ownership. This should only occur if the first time you open xterm you sudo gainroot - since no .ash_history exists, when you exit root's shell it is created with only root having permission to write (preventing non-root command history from being written to the file).

Use 'ls -l /home/user/.ash_history' to verify. If the file is owned by root (3rd column), that is your problem.

sudo gainroot
chown user.users /home/user/.ash_history

OR

sudo gainroot
chmod a+w /home/user/.ash_history

Either will fix the permissions to allow non-root command history to be retained.

Re: Xterm does not saved all executed commands
 

Sweet worked great cheers.:)

Re: Xterm does not saved all executed commands
 

Two notes about this:

First, I found that ~/.ash_history, the file where ash normally saves history information, had root as the owner and group; this prevented saving history. Check and see if you have the same problem, and if so, remove ~/.ash_history. See bug 5896 for one reason that might happen.

Second, note that history does *not* get saved if you click the X in the upper-right corner of the xterm. Instead, type "exit", or press ctrl-d. See bug 5317 for that.

Re: Xterm does not saved all executed commands
 

Yes. Working fine for me at the mo. Only for user, root still uses ash.

Re: Xterm does not saved all executed commands
 

Note also the easier workaround buried at the end of bug 5317 comment 7:

(though I think catching just SIGHUP should be enough for the osso-xterm case).

Re: Xterm does not saved all executed commands
 

Yeah, I can confirm that just
makes ash save history even if you just close the xterm.

Re: Xterm does not saved all executed commands
 

As for this:

The default appears to be 15 lines of history, as that is the largest my .ash_history file gets. What should I add to my .profile (or .ashrc) to change the lines of history stored? I tried setting HISTSIZE=100 in .profile but that doesn't seem to do it.

I noticed that $HISTFILE is set to /home/user/.ash_history, but $HISTSIZE is not initialized by default. Is it a different variable in ash?

Re: Xterm does not saved all executed commands
 

I can confirm that ash only saves 15 lines of history. This still proves useful, but given 2GB of space for /home, I'd rather store a few thousand. :)

I looked into it, and it seems that this gets set at compile time, not runtime. As far as I can tell, no means exists to set this at runtime. Thus, I've filed bug 7014, asking for this limit to increase or become dynamic.