Re: About de-duplicating the history and history appending

[Max Blue <Bluemax48@hotmail.com>]

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Hello.

Thanks Larry for the clear explanation, this things are hard for me to 
explain.


These are fundamentally incompatible goals.  Bash and zsh will not
cooperate with each other for purposes of (avoiding) overlapping
writes, the timestamp formats are incompatible, and the zsh history is
stored "metafied" -- it is not a plain text file.  That also explains
this:

>> that after running this script, some special characters becomes 'weird'
>> into the *.bash_history *viewing. With weird i mean things like *＃º
>> *and* ＃º *,which fortunately are not present in the terminal history
>> (the commands are properly shown in there).

About the timestamps, i do not use those, so i think that would not be a 
problem. I have seen, when the trying some options which broke the 
history file (truncated it somehow), that there was some kind of 
timestamp in the 2 last commands, but they are not present in the 
.bash_history now. I think that the timestamp is disabled on my side, 
and that's why i do not see it.

It makes sense to me now that sharing the history file for both shells 
does not make sense and that would be causing those 'funny' characters 
into the /.bash_history/ file. Those ones, on the other hand, display 
correctly in the zsh shell, when looking through the history. Besides 
that, should i expect any other kind of trouble if continuing like this? 
i have been a while in bash and almost all my history lines are written 
that way.


    HIST_EXPIRE_DUPS_FIRST

I think this one is not what i want, this will 'prune' the history when 
some kind of limit on the history lines is reached. I just want to keep 
my history file as clean as possible, but i also keep it long( 
/HISTSIZE=2000000/ , because i do not want to lose lines).

    My approach to this would be to use "fc -p" to point to a new history
    file with setopts as appropriate from the above, pull the HISTFILE
    into that with "fc -R", write it out again with "fc -W", then move
    that to the desired history file with appropriate locking (which you
    can probably do by calling "fc -P" to switch back to the original
    history and then cycling -R/-W again).

    If you write that as a zsh script you can invoke it from bash to clean
    up bash's history as well, with the timestamp caveat.  I'm not at my
    usual computer right now so not going to test details, I'll chime in
    again later if things seem to be going awry.


I do not understand how implement this, and what would be the difference 
about the previous idea of the /trap/ command. I will appreciate if you 
can elaborate about this when you can.


Bluey.

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