Why do Windows consoles lose command-line history (up arrow) after a time?

Question

It seems random: after some amount of time / usage of any console I use on Windows Vista, I lose the ability to use the command-line history (or command buffer, if you prefer...), and hitting the up or down arrow no longer does anything at all, meaning there are essentially 0 items available in the history.

I've seen this behavior in Cygwin, CMD, and PowerShell.

Sometimes this behavior applies to processes running inside the console - Python, MySQL client, etc.

Is this an inherent problem in Windows? A setting somewhere? Are there other consoles that don't have this problem?

ps - if you think this is non-programming related, please see other questions regarding programming tools, for instance, nearly anything tagged "eclipse" which deal with how to use the IDE rather than programming for it.

Answer 1

There's a maximum size of history buffer in a windows "DOS box" -- Upper left icon, right click, select properties and you'll see the Command History has a buffer size of 50 by default.

Answer 2

What happens if you hit F7 to display the history, does it show the full list or only up to the point that the up arrow is stopping at?

/matt

Answer 3

In PowerShell you can control the maximum size of history via the MaximumHistoryCount automatic variable (default is 64)

PS > $MaximumHistoryCount