can't write zsh_history

[Michael Hernandez <sequethin@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Every now and then I need to su on some servers that I work on  
(mostly old freebsd systems that don't have sudo installed and have  
no outbound net connections, i.e. installing sudo is not an option).  
The problem, which is really more of an annoyance than a problem, is  
that if I su to run some command and I don't cd first,  
my .zsh_history file becomes owned by root. After I exit from # and  
run a command as my regular user, zsh tells me that it can't write  
the history file, which of course it can't because it's now owned by  
root. Is there something I can do to alter the way zsh writes to my  
history file when I am root? Something like "if uid is 0 then write  
the history to root's history file and leave .zsh_history alone"?  It  
should be noted that on these machines root's shell is tcsh, except  
in one case where it's ksh (not my idea I promise!) so I'm not sure  
why .zsh_history is touched at all when I'm root. Another oddity is  
that if I chown the file to my user, the file becomes corrupt, which  
is even more frustrating. The version of zsh for each of these  
machines is 4.2.6.

As I said, this is a minor annoyance, but I figured I'd ask in case  
someone else has experienced this before and has a remedy.

Thanks!

Mike H


PS. I just tested this on an openbsd 3.9 firewall that I have, with  
zsh version 4.2.6, and where root's shell is ksh. Same thing happens.