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?

score 220 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 21 '21 at 08:23

220

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

Afterwards, you may want to instruct zsh to re-read the history form the recovered history file

fc -R .zsh_history

edited Feb 21 '21 at 08:23

Flow

answered Aug 16 '15 at 03:54

gak

score 32 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 06 '18 at 10:03

32

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)

answered Jul 06 '18 at 10:03

aksh1618

2 Answers2