After years of using bash as my default interactive shell at $DAYJOB,
I decided to switch to zsh. I didn’t want to start from scratch and lose all
my history though:
$ wc -l ~/.bash_history | cut -f1 -d' '
64002
Thus my goal was to first migrate all my history from bash to zsh.
The bash-to-zsh-hist.py python script in this
gist
did most of the job:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#
# This is how I used it:
# $ cat ~/.bash_history | python bash-to-zsh-hist.py >> ~/.zsh_history
import sys
import time
def main():
timestamp = None
for line in sys.stdin.readlines():
line = line.rstrip('\n')
if line.startswith('#') and timestamp is None:
t = line[1:]
if t.isdigit():
timestamp = t
continue
else:
sys.stdout.write(': %s:0;%s\n' % (timestamp or time.time(), line))
timestamp = None
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
To use it:
$ wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/muendelezaji/c14722ab66b505a49861b8a74e52b274/raw/49f0fb7f661bdf794742257f58950d209dd6cb62/bash-to-zsh-hist.py
$ chmod +x ./bash-to-zsh-hist.py
$ cat .bash_history | ./bash-to-zsh-hist.py >> ~/.zsh_history
However, that didn’t fully work. Upon running zsh, there was an error:
$ zsh
zsh: corrupt history file /usr/local/google/home/tperrotta/.zsh_history
A quick google search led me to a blog post. I adapted the command suggest therein1:
$ strings -eS .zsh_history | sponge .zsh_history
And that fixed the issue!