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Comment by mmsc | Hacker News Reader

I also like to use

  sudo chattr +a .sh_history

to ensure that my shell history file isn’t deleted.

Being append-only, it also ensures that some type of timing issue in my shell which means my HISTFILESIZE or the equivalent isn’t set to something larger than default, meaning my history isn’t deleted.

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If the shell is unaware that the file is append only, does it result in appending not just the commands run from this session but undesirably also ends up appending a full copy of a lot of the previous history?

I guess it means that the open() syscall will require the O_APPEND flag. If the file is opened without that flag it will error out.

a weaker method is to set a non-default HISTFILE after HISTSIZE etc

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