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?
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
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7May I ask what does the command
fc -R .zsh_historymean? I've triedman fcand it tells me thatNo manual entry for fc, and neither could thefc -htell me more than the usage. Thanks. – kenshinji Aug 5 '16 at 5:15 -
2For 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 -
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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 at 20:59
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1For the correct
fcdocumentation, seeman 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 at 4:51
Simply removing random characters may also work:
vim .zsh_historyRemove 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)
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I also had a bunch of
@s in one line. I removed those and voila, the error is gone! – illusionist Jul 10 at 3:38
