How to fix a corrupt zsh history file

Occasionally you may find you have a corrupt zsh history file preventing you from using CTRL+R or from using the `fc` command. Here's how to fix it.

• October 6, 2016
• Updated September 19, 2024

Corrupt ZSH history file ¶

If you use zsh for your shell very occasionally you may find the following message appearing indicating a corrupt history file.

zsh: corrupt history file /home/go/.zsh_history

This prevents searching back through the history with CTRL+R and editing previous commands with fc.

How to fix it ¶

To fix it run the following commands

cd ~
mv .zsh_history .zsh_history_bad
strings .zsh_history_bad > .zsh_history
fc -R .zsh_history
rm ~/.zsh_history_bad

What’s happening? ¶

• The zsh_history file gets corrupted somehow and the shell is unable to read it.
• The corrupted file is moved to a new file zsh_history_bad.
• The strings command is used to extract strings (or text) from the zsh_history_bad file and the output is written to a new file zsh_history.
• The zsh builtin command fc is used to read the history from the fixed zsh_history file.
• Finally the corrupted file zsh_history_file can be removed.
• All done!

Making it a script ¶

Once this happened more than twice I made a script to save some typing. The following is saved in my ~/bin folder as zsh_history_fix and this folder is in my $PATH.

#!/usr/bin/env zsh
# George Ornbo (shapeshed) http://shapeshed.com
# License - http://unlicense.org
#
# Fixes a corrupt .zsh_history file

mv ~/.zsh_history ~/.zsh_history_bad
strings ~/.zsh_history_bad > ~/.zsh_history
fc -R ~/.zsh_history
rm ~/.zsh_history_bad

Now if I see the zsh: corrupt history file error again I just run the command get back to work.

zsh_history_fix

If you’d like the script you can download it from Github, put it somewhere in your $PATH and make it executable.

cd ~/bin # or somewhere in your $PATH
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shapeshed/dotfiles/master/bin/zsh_history_fix
chmod +x zsh_history_fix
source ~/.zshrc

Tags

• Unix
• Linux

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See Also

• Linux and Unix ls command tutorial with examples
  Oct 4, 2016
  Tutorial on using ls, a UNIX and Linux command for listing directory contents. Examples of listing a directory, showing hidden files, showing long listings, sorting on various items and showing recursive listings.

• Linux and Unix tail command tutorial with examples
  Oct 3, 2016
  Tutorial on using tail, a UNIX and Linux command for outputting the last part of files. Examples of outputting the last ten lines of a file, limiting the number of lines, limiting the number of bytes, showing multiple files, watching a file for changes and using pipes.

• Linux and Unix fc command tutorial with examples
  Sep 28, 2016
  Tutorial on using fc, a UNIX and Linux command for editing and re-executing commands previously entered into an interactive shell. Examples of editing and re-executing the last command, editing and executing a previous command, setting the text editor to be used, listing previous commands and executing a command without editing it.