Re: question about saving history and error reporting

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Dec 22, 10:14am, frederik@ofb.net wrote:
}
} For me, if the history can't be written, it would be convenient to
} know about the errors that are being generated immediately, so that I
} can fix the problem. Are there many situations where the history can't
} be written due to a problem which is transient?

The most common reason in the case of inc_append_history could be that
multiple shells are updating the file at the same time.  There are also
things like home directories on remote filesystems that are temporarily
unreachable.

Really it's not the responsibility of the shell history mechanism to
alert you about system-wide failure conditions like a full disk, and
I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to rely on it for that.

} Are there other cases where Zsh hides errors that occur during its
} operation?

That's a rather wide-open question.  The (programmed in shell code)
completion system deliberately suppresses all sorts of errors that
might occur during generating the possible matching words, because
they're irrelevant to updating the command line and displaying them
would mess up screen for ZLE.  Within the C code, I would not be
surprised if there are other implicit actions for which displaying
an error state is considered unnecessarily verbose, but I can't tell
you of any offhand.