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From: buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: no command history with ksh as root?
Message-ID: <499@siswat.UUCP>
Date: 12 Feb 90 16:44:41 GMT
References: <497@siswat.UUCP> <720012@hpcljws.HP.COM>
Organization: Photon Graphics,  Houston
Lines: 21

In article <720012@hpcljws.HP.COM>, jws@hpcljws.HP.COM (John Stafford) writes:
> The reason ksh wants HISTFILE set for root is that it is deemed impolite
> to automatically write the history file for a root user.  That root user
> might be trying to repair a file system and writing history to that file
> system would be unfriendly.

While this might make some sense, this was not the problem, since ksh was
happily writing my /.sh_history file, it just wouldn't let me edit it.
Thanks to the several people who sent me suggestions that I needed to set
HISTFILE explicitly, and that does solve the access problem.  Larry Jones
(scjones@sdrc.uu.net) had the most reasonable guess for this behaviour:

	Not having source code I can't say for sure, but it looks to me
	like a simple bug in ksh.  My guess is it uses
	"$HOME/.sh_history" as the name of the history file which, if
	you're root, turns out to be "//.sh_history" which don't work too
	good.


-- 
A. Lester Buck     buck@siswat.lonestar.org  ...!texbell!moray!siswat!buck