How to fix a corrupt zsh history file

Occasionally you may find you have a corrupt zsh history file preventing you from using CTRL+R or from using the fc command.

Corrupt ZSH history file

If you use zsh for your shell very occasionally you may find the following message appearing indicating a corrupt history file.

zsh: corrupt history file /home/go/.zsh_history

This prevents searching back through the history with CTRL+R and editing previous commands with fc.

How to fix it!

Run the following commands:

cd ~
mv .zsh_history .zsh_history_bad
strings .zsh_history_bad > .zsh_history
fc -R .zsh_history
rm ~/.zsh_history_bad