Save terminal commands history

[LucaGabi]

Save gitbash terminal commands history on vscode exit for future sessions.

(using windows 10 it's not available)

[Tyriar]

This is maybe happening because of how we're killing/cleaning up the process?

Not confirmed but I've seen plenty of reports for this on Windows.

[blueworrybear]

Hi, I have encountered this issue too. After studying, it seems to me that it's because how node-pty kill process.

At windowsTerminal.ts:161

public kill(signal?: string): void {
    this._defer(() => {
      if (signal) {
        throw new Error('Signals not supported on windows.');
      }
      this._close();
      this._agent.kill();
    });
  }

The process is force killed, therefore the shell terminates immediately and does not save history.

The possible solutions IMO may be:

1. Users set PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a" by themselves.

   This is what I do for short-term solution.

2. Send a exit command before pty killed.

   Maybe add below code:
   terminalProcess.ts:190

   try {
   	if (this._ptyProcess) {
   		this._logService.trace('IPty#kill');
   		this._ptyProcess.write('exit\r\n');
   		this._ptyProcess.kill();
   	}
   } catch (ex) {
   	// Swallow, the pty has already been killed
   }

   Not sure it's an acceptable way to solve this problem. 🤔

Please let me know what you think. I would like to solve this issue.

[Tyriar]

@blueworrybear writing exit won't be good enough as there may not be enough time to exit gracefully before kill anyway (a race condition) and also exit\r\n might not do anything depending on the state of the terminal. What we really need is a way to signal the process to shutdown gracefully and kill it forcefully if it didn't happen several seconds later. Something like this but it would be better if there was a node.js API to do it (even if we need to go to C++): https://stackoverflow.com/a/6860723/1156119

[blueworrybear]

@Tyriar you are right. Sending exit\r\n is not a good idea. My first thought is to graceful kill the process. However, I found that I am unable to graceful kill bash with taskkill. I got an error message when I tried taskkill /PID <pid>. It said the process could be killed only with /F option. I am still looking for the solution. 😕

[SterlingButters]

@Tyriar @blueworrybear And does PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a" have any obvious disadvantages?

[jerrygreen]

I have this problem on windows, but I don't have it on macos

It seems nobody's using VSCode on windows?

[Tyriar]

I don't think this is actionable so closing off.