On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 12:36:58PM -0700, Wayne Davison wrote:
> [non-appending history-file writing] will have to be improved in some
> other manner, possibly by switching over to using a *.new file to
> write out the new history lines

Here's a patch that makes the savehistfile() function use a temporary
file whenever it writes out the whole file from the start (rather than
overwriting the existing file).  This could be controversial if someone
out there has a symlink for their history file (since it would get
replaced by the temp file, and thus would no longer remain a symlink).

The naming scheme I chose to use was to write out the history data using
the name $HISTFILE.$$ since this naming idiom is already used for a
temporary file name when acquiring the $HISTFILE.LOCK lock file (there's
also no conflict with that use).  If folks think that $HISTFILE.new is a
better choice, it would be easy to change.

Thoughts?  Is this a desired change?

..wayne..