csh/history/su problem

[yurtesen]

Hello,

I have a problem where the history is not written to disk.

For example, user A logs into the machine and uses 'su -' to become root, if A does not logout properly but just closes his ssh client, the history is not saved. If A logs out from the machine properly, then closes the ssh client then the history is saved.

Perhaps the shell could be killed when user closes the ssh client and it is not able to write history?

Does anybody have a workaround?

Thanks,
Evren

[Carpetsmoker]

What's your savehist setting in in the tcsh start file?
I've been using:

set savehist = 4096 merge

For ages, and never noticed any "amnesia" from my shell, but as I understand tcsh(1), $ history -S is run "when exiting the shell". I'm not sure if losing a ssh connection is handled as a "proper" exit.

You can try adding $ history -S to /etc/csh.logout, and you can of course also run it manually to save the history ...

[Carpetsmoker]

Update:
I just tested this, I connected with putty, closed the session by going to the task manager and killing putty, and when I logged back on, the history was saved.

[yurtesen]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

Update:
I just tested this, I connected with putty, closed the session by going to the task manager and killing putty, and when I logged back on, the history was saved.

It seems to work here as well if I login as a normal user then close the putty using the X in the corner.

However if I login as a normal user and then do a 'su -' and then close using X in the corner, the normal user seems to have his history saved but nothing he did when he was root was saved in root's history.

If I logout from being root before closing with X, then root gets the .history file updated.

I have the savehist set properly I believe and the csh manual says that this implies 'history -S' ... so that shouldnt be a problem either?