tikul yeah HISTSIZE works but in the next login. when i logged into my account again it worked! thanks to you . have a good one

google, had a question for you. you asked me to echo a space to my .sh_history file. now whenever i access it, it's always empty. isn't that file supposed to get loaded with the commands used by the user again? can you comment on that please . Thank you n have a good one

For the KSH, set the following variables in your .profile. Then either source your profile or log out and come back in. I havent encountered the issues you describe.

HISTFILE
The name of the file used to store history. When assigned to, history is loaded from the specified file. Also, several invocations of the shell running on the same machine share their history if their HISTFILE parameters all point at the same file.
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If HISTFILE isn't set, no history file is used. This is different from the original Korn shell, which uses $HOME/.sh_history; in the future, ksh may also use a default history file.

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HISTSIZE
The number of commands normally stored for history, default 128.