Fedora 8: tcsh .history file destroyed on exit?

[Phil Meyer]

James Frye wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've just installed Fedora 8 on a new machine (Lenovo T61p), and am having
> problems getting
> tcsh to run correctly.  The main problem is that when I exit, the .history
> file is destroyed.  It's
> not that the current session history is not saved.  I copied a .history
> file from my older machine
> loaded it, and the history mechanism works as expected for that session.
> On restart, though,
> I find that the .history file has been truncated to 0 bytes.
>
>   

This has been the default behavior for tcsh for many years.  I can't 
even remember what year that changed ...

Check your .tcshrc -- your savehist may not be correct:  here is mine:

        set history=999
        set savehist=900 merge

> I have two perhaps related other problems.  First, tcsh was not installed
> by the install system.  I
> had to compile it from source.  Second, the root user does not source
> its .tcshrc file when I su
> or log in as root.  I have to do this manually.
>   
As another has suggested:

# yum install tcsh

It may not be a good idea to set root's shell to tcsh, since many 
processes executed as root may depend on bash syntax.

Having installed from source, the tcsh binary may have the wrong 
permissions:

 -> ls -l /bin/tcsh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 351528 2007-08-31 03:39 /bin/tcsh*

Or may have been built with less than optimal 'configure' arguments.
> If it helps, I run xterm under the fvwm2 window manage, and am using a
> system setup that was
> copied from the Fedora 7 install on my previous machine, and which have
> worked with various
> Fedora versions going back to 3 (IIRC), as well as other distros.
>   

Good luck!