Re: PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a; history -n' causes shell hang in OX 10.10 Yosemite / bash 3.2.53

[Graham Jones]

Thanks Chet. 

Couple of notes:

1) I’m not setting HISTFILESIZE, only HISTSIZE. HISTFILESIZE is getting set for 
me based on my choice of HISTSIZE (though I assume this is something that bash 
does that you know about). 
2) As mentioned in the initial bug report, if I set PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a; 
history -r’ in my profile, my terminal was immediately hanging on 
initialisation. Since reseting the history file though, this no longer seems to 
be the case. 

> On 6 Nov 2014, at 1:25 pm, Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:
> 
> On 11/4/14 5:16 PM, Piotr Grzybowski wrote:
>> Chet: for reasons unexplained calls to read_history_range at
>> 
>> history.def:219
>> 219           result = read_history_range (filename, history_lines_in_file, 
>> -1);
>> 
>> return more and more records (77824 is above my HISTFILESIZE):
> 
> There is an issue with this particular, relatively infrequent, set of
> circumstances:
> 
> 1. HISTFILESIZE > HISTSIZE
> 2. Actual size of the history file > HISTSIZE
> 3. history list contains HISTSIZE entries
> 4. the user executes a sequence of `history -a; history -n'.  Even
>   `history -a; history -r' would probably prevent this, at the cost
>   of more malloc/free operations.
> 
> In this case, history_lines_in_file (which, despite its name, is supposed
> to keep track of how many lines bash has read from the history file) is
> calculated incorrectly.  The result is that bash reads way too many lines
> from the history file each time.
> 
> There are a couple of ways to fix it: one that uses facilities the history
> library provides today and one that changes the history library to expose
> the values more directly.  One will appear in the next snapshot.
> 
> Chet
> 
> -- 
> ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
>                ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
> Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/