Why Does BASH on Mac OSX Rarely Save to History
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I find it very frustrating working with Apple Mac OSX for anything on the command line because extremely often what I am working on never gets saved to the command history. So if I go to repeat a command, look up what I have done, etc. it is not saved. Whole categories of things that I work on don't go into the history at all. I know that this Mac has been unreliable and has all kinds of stability issues (but generally not the terminal) but this seems very basic and rather extreme so I am guessing that something is wrong. The command history is full of details, but it is anything but complete.
Is there someway to manage this behaviour to have it work reliably and consistently like CentOS, for example?
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I have none of the problems you have, with my MacBook Pro.
So claiming that Macs are "generally unreliable and have all kinds of stability issues" is simply your specific experience. Yes, possibly also that of some people you know, but that makes it far from "generally."
My experience has been completely the opposite as well as more than one person who has posted in your threads on the subject here in the past.
Stick to facts and not conjecture.
Specific to your complaint about bash, I can open a terminal and hit the up arrow and go back through everything I have done for more history than I even recall using it for until I see the commands again.
In fact I used mine today in order to get the screen command to connect to a ERL via USB console cable. I had thought it was one of the last things I had done. But it was not as I had forgotten about a bunch of SSH stuff I had done last week.
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@JaredBusch said:
I have none of the problems you have, with my MacBook Pro.
Mine crashes a few time a day.
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@JaredBusch said:
Specific to your complaint about bash, I can open a terminal and hit the up arrow and go back through everything I have done for more history than I even recall using it for until I see the commands again.
This is completely lacking here. I can see a lot of history but tons of it is missing. Some commands appear to be always missing, specifically Chef Knife commands. I've never once issued a system build command and had it available in the command history once the shell restarts. Not once. It might be completely coincidence but that one command I've noticed is 100% missing from the history over more than a month of testing.
It is extremely strange to see it recording sporadically and not all or nothing.
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@JaredBusch said:
In fact I used mine today in order to get the screen command to connect to a ERL via USB console cable. I had thought it was one of the last things I had done. But it was not as I had forgotten about a bunch of SSH stuff I had done last week.
I can see stuff much older in there, it's a very recent command that I was looking for and I've been keeping an eye on this as it seems to happen so often. There are tons of times that I don't go looking for old commands so it is hard to say how often it happens. But I know that certain complex commands appear to never be stored at all.
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And I've resorted to directly quierying the history rather than working through the shell itself too, to see if that changed anything but it is just not in there.
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I should point out, now that I think about it, that recalling the commands using the "up arrow" even when I just used it does not work consistently either. It will randomly (as far as I can tell) recall different versions of the commands, including ones I have not run. So I have the issue when I go to run a command twice in a row, I have to check it very carefully because it does not come back up the same always, even when it was the very last command.
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Does Mac have something like psacct? I thought I read somewhere that it had accton and you could run lastcomm.
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@johnhooks said:
Does Mac have something like psacct? I thought I read somewhere that it had accton and you could run lastcomm.
I tried lastcomm, but no luck. Does not appear to be available.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Does Mac have something like psacct? I thought I read somewhere that it had accton and you could run lastcomm.
I tried lastcomm, but no luck. Does not appear to be available.
Oh, sorry. I have almost zero Mac experience. I never wanted to shell out the money for one. I'll look around though.
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Yeah, this is my first one in a very long time and I'm constantly frustrated with things not working, crashes, things that I'm just confused by or whatever.
I timed the boot time on this yesterday.... 14 seconds from power on to password, 28 seconds from password to second password (why does it always need that twice) and another 14 seconds from second password to usable desktop. I can't remember anything booting that slowly since we were using spinning disks on Windows XP and even then I feel like it was comparable or better plus never required that I log in twice.
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My machine crashed overnight last night. No idea why. There has to be something wrong with it.
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That sucks. If it makes you feel any better my Fedora 22 boots in about three seconds (after the bios screen).
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That's more of what I am used to. Even brand new out of the box this thing booted roughly the same as it does now. Nothing has noticeably changed. The double logins were always needed (I suspect that it crashes after the first boot and boots again, but there is no way to tell and this is how it has always worked and it never tells me there was a crash, just seems to do everything twice.) I can't tell that it takes any longer than when it was fresh from the box.
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This any help?
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3922262 -
Sadly no, I get most history, just not all. So can't be permissions. Very different than his issue of no history whatsoever.
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@scottalanmiller As much of a problem that OS X has given you, I shudder to think: Have you tried Windows 10 or $favoriteLinuxDistro to see if the system runs better under another OS? If not, then it may actually be hardware problems.
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@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller As much of a problem that OS X has given you, I shudder to think: Have you tried Windows 10 or $favoriteLinuxDistro to see if the system runs better under another OS? If not, then it may actually be hardware problems.
I can't practically replace the OS on the hardware. That would be nice. A potential alternative is to run Linux in a VM which, from my testing, is completely stable and normal (within the confines of the overall OS staying up and running.)
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If it is crashing that often you may have something else wrong. I haven't had mine crash in months, but I have a mac pro server that isn't waking up from sleep with out being unplugged for 10 seconds. It only happens about once every other week. Called Apple, they did a online log dump, couldn't find anything but kept putting pressure on them. They agreed to let me bring it into a Apple store for more diagnostics and have told me if they can't figure it out, they will replace it for free.
If I was you I would start keeping a log of system crashes for about a week, then call and start hounding on support because what you are experiencing is not normal. The plus side is Apple stands behind their hardware and their OS so as long as you are still under warrantee, they will cover both.
