Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!gatech!ncsuvx!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ames!umd5!cvl!elsie!ado
From: ado@elsie.UUCP (Arthur David Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: why doesn't command history work for user root?
Summary: The real scoop
Keywords: ksh
Message-ID: <8091@elsie.UUCP>
Date: 9 Jun 88 03:07:35 GMT
References: <321@cmtl01.UUCP> <10357@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Organization: NIH-LEC, Bethesda, MD
Lines: 21

Okay gang. . .the REAL scoop on why ksh doesn't keep history for the root user:
after your system has crashed and comes up single user, you don't want to be
writing command history to the root partition and possibly compounding damage
to the file system.

Here at elsie, our /.profile file contains these line:

	ENV=/.kshrc
	export ENV

and our /.kshrc file contains these lines:

	if [ -z "$HISTFILE" ]
	then
		echo "If you want to keep command history, type"
		echo "	doh"
		echo "when it's safe to write to the root disk"
		alias doh='HISTFILE=/.history; export HISTFILE; exec /etc/ksh'
	fi
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