How to fix and recover a “corrupt history file” in zsh?

Question

After a reboot, I started seeing a message when loading the shell:

zsh: corrupt history file /home/myusername/.zsh_history

How can I recover from this situation and potentially recover some of the history?

gak · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-08 21:34:35Z

166

Found a blog post describing a fix that appears to work for me, while restoring my missing history:

mv .zsh_history .zsh_history_bad
strings .zsh_history_bad > .zsh_history
fc -R .zsh_history

answered Aug 16 '15 at 3:54

gak

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7

May I ask what does the command fc -R .zsh_history mean? I've tried man fc and it tells me that No manual entry for fc, and neither could the fc -h tell me more than the usage. Thanks. – kenshinji Aug 5 '16 at 5:15
2

For more details about the fc command, see here and here. The -R option is not present there, but zsh completion lists, among the options, -R -- read history from file – Jeffrey Lebowski Aug 23 '16 at 11:41
Anyone knows what this error could have been caused by? – hugronaphor Jan 15 '18 at 21:31
1

@hugronaphor In my case it was that I had to do a hard shutdown of my laptop. This caused some issues for me as I did this during a disk write operation and one of the things that got corrupted was my zsh file among other things. – RyanNerd Jan 26 '18 at 20:59
1

For the correct fc documentation, see man zshbuiltins, also available at zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Shell-Builtin-Commands.html. As suggested by Jeffrey, "‘fc -R’ reads the history from the given file". – Martin Jan 29 '18 at 4:51

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aksh1618 · Accepted Answer · 2018-07-06 10:03:44Z

Simply removing random characters may also work:

vim .zsh_history
Remove any strange characters, which would most probably be near the end. (In my case I had a string of @ in the second last line, following a forced shutdown)
:x (save and exit)

2 Answers 2