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If you use zsh for your shell very occasionally you may find the following message appearing indicating a corrupt history file. This is normally after a reboot.
zsh: corrupt history file /home/george/.zsh_history
This prevents searching back through the history with CTRL+R and editing previous commands with fc.
To fix it run the following commands
cd ~
mv .zsh_history .zsh_history_bad
strings -eS .zsh_history_bad > .zsh_history
fc -R .zsh_history
Once this happened more than twice I made a script to fix the issue. 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 -eS ~/.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 directly 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
Have an update or suggestion for this article? You can edit it here and send me a pull request.