Save history at the present working directory?

[biocyberman]

I like it very much so far. However, I prefer to have the history saved in a file the the current working directory. The use case is like this:

• User1 enters the DIR to run some command.
• User2 changes to DIR and wants to review what has been run on DIR.
• It can also the same User1 entering DIR, but he may have copied the DIR to other computers. An on-site history file helps as a command log for what has been done to the data stored in DIR.

I am aware that this gives no merit to security and we may have tons of 'history' files lying all over the places. So it is nice to have an option to turn off by default and turn on history saving to a file by a keyboard shortcut.

[jimhester]

The history file for the current directory is defined as $HISTORY_BASE${PWD:A}/history.

To make this easy to use you can define a helper function to retrieve the current history file.

history_file() { echo $HISTORY_BASE${PWD:A}/history }
less $(history_file)

[biocyberman]

@jimhester Thanks for the instruction. Would it break anything if I change _per_directory_history_directory="$HISTORY_BASE${PWD:A}/history"

to _per_directory_history_directory="${PWD}/.zshhistory"

Here I changed both the path to history file and the filename. I want to explore this possibility so I can write a function for enable writing command log at $PWD

[yannickwurm]

Dear @jimhester and @biocyberman - I agree that per directory history is very helpful and similarly would find it more useful to have the local history in a local file rather than in a shared hierarchy.

This is because I regularly have to move my working dirs between different filesystems (archival, fast shared scratch, local temp). Thus during the course of a project, a specific directory would have been in several different physical locations.

@biocyberman have you tested your proposal succesfully?

Thanks and kind regards, Yannick

[biocyberman]

@yannickwurm I went ahead and make the changes. Everything works fine, you can check it out here: https://github.com/biocyberman/per-directory-history/tree/dev But there is a drawback with my approach: file may be easily deleted or overwritten (i.e. when copying). Maybe maintaining two copies of this local history, one at the central $HISTORY_BASE, and one at the local $PWD.

[jimhester]

Trying to use a file in the current directory will also fail if the user does not have write permissions to the directory (which was the main reason for not doing so).

If you really want to have a file in the current directory I would keep the current history as it is and also create a symbolic link in the current file e.g. ln -s $HISTORY_BASE${PWD:A}/history ${PWD:A}/.zhistory

[CyberShadow]

Wouldn't setting HISTORY_BASE to an empty string achieve this?

[biocyberman]

Wouldn't setting HISTORY_BASE to an empty string achieve this?

That's equivalent to what I did: remove $HISTORY_BASE: https://github.com/jimhester/per-directory-history/compare/master...biocyberman:dev I didn't set HISTORY_BASE to empty string because that may interfere with other parts.