3b1 ksh history; what happened?

[Augustine Cano]

Hello again, netland!

This erratic behavior is driving me nuts.  I hope someone out there can
clarify what is going on.

At first, a full screen unix invocation from the UA would give me a new
ksh (as expected) and the old .kshistory file which might contain any
number of entries from previous ksh's.  Then, as a result of some update
or change (the fix disk?), ksh invocation would start a new history file.
Not only that, but if I had more than one ksh going at the same time in
different windows, each would have its own history file.  Then, recently,
possibly as a result of one of those hard disk timeout crashes, it's back
to the old behavior.  No matter how many simultaneous ksh's I have on
different windows, they all share the same file, which remains (and grows)
even across reboots.  I also noticed that before (when each ksh had its
own history) a hard disk timeout crash would invariably require a double
reboot, after having fixed up the file system.  Invariably the recovered
files that appeared in /lost+found were the ksh history files (one for
each ksh running at the time of the crash).  Now the reboots complete in
one try, no files appear in /lost+found but the .kshistory file in ~
grows and grows.

I would like to go back to the situation where each ksh had its own
history and a new ksh started with no previous history.  I have not
changed .kshrc or .profile and they do not seem to be corrupted.  Did
some other file get wiped out?  Could this have to do with the permissions
of .kshistory?  Can someone explain what is happening?

I have just tried the ksh that came with the fixdisk and the one that came
with the development set (which is the one I was running): same behavior.
BTW both were freshly restored from floppy, in case I was dealing with a
case of corruption.  I'm running 3.51a minus the ksh fix since it is only
relevant to emacs mode and I don't use emacs.

WHAT IS GOING ON ??? HELP !!!  I'll summarize e-mail responses.

Thanks in advance.

Augustine Cano		canoaf at dept.csci.unt.edu