History file, binary?

[Nicholas Papadonis]

I changed my init files to place ksh history on a per process basis into a subdirectory with each history labeled by PID.  It appears that ksh history files are in binary format, while bash is in ASCII text.  My goal was to search histories with grep.

How can I read the old files?  I read something about the "fc -l" command however could not find documentation.

Any guidance appreciated.

[Andras Farkas]

Which version?
Please try both:
ksh93 --version
(substitute ksh93 with whatever name you normally call the shell by)
and
echo ${.sh.version}
and paste the results here.

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[Andras Farkas]

Also, fc is an alias for hist, and hist is documented in the man page
and also by:
hist --help
It's not entirely ideal, since it has leading whitespace, but you can do:
hist -ln -N 1000 | grep yourregex
to search through the past 1001 lines.
or
hist -ln 30 800 | grep yourregex
to search through lines 30 and 800 inclusive.

I don't think there's a way (or remember if there's a way) to get a
plaintext history file. I hope someone else chimes in!

[Andras Farkas]

Also, looking online, looks like people have much success with:
strings -n 1 .sh_history | grep yourregex

[Nicholas Papadonis]

1 [debian:~]$ echo $0

-ksh93

2 [debian:~]$ ksh93 --version

  version         sh (AT&T Research) 93u+ 2012-08-01

3 [debian:~]$ echo ${.sh.version}

Version AJM 93u+ 2012-08-01

On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 11:37 PM Andras Farkas <deepblu...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Andras Farkas]

Yep! All my advice will work in your version of ksh. :D