Occasionally you may find you have a corrupt zsh history file preventing you from using the fc command or searching the history. Here's how to fix it.
Estimated reading time: 1 minutes
If you use zsh for your shell very occasionally you may find the following message appearing indicating a corrupt history file. This is normally after a reboot.
zsh: corrupt history file /home/george/.zsh_history This prevents searching back through the history with CTRL+R and editing previous commands with fc.
To fix it run the following commands
cd ~
mv .zsh_history .zsh_history_bad
strings .zsh_history_bad > .zsh_history
fc -R .zsh_historyOnce this happened more than twice I made a script to fix the issue. The following is saved in my ~/bin folder as zsh_history_fix and this folder is in my $PATH.
#!/usr/bin/env zsh
# George Ornbo (shapeshed) http://shapeshed.com
# License - http://unlicense.org
#
# Fixes a corrupt .zsh_history file
mv ~/.zsh_history ~/.zsh_history_bad
strings ~/.zsh_history_bad > ~/.zsh_history
fc -R ~/.zsh_history
rm ~/.zsh_history_badNow if I see the zsh: corrupt history file error again I just run the command get back to work.
zsh_history_fixIf you'd like the script you can download it directly from Github, put it somewhere in your $PATH and make it executable.
cd ~/bin # or somewhere in your $PATH
wget https://github.com/shapeshed/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/zsh_history_fix
chmod +x zsh_history_fix