The $HOME/.history file should be only a few KBs -- however, in a few occasions, we have seen exploding $HOME/.history especially when working on LiMa. In all these cases, the file somehow became severely corrupted. We are not sure yet why/how this happens.

Unfortunately, just deleting the file will not fix this problem: The next time you close a shell (e.g. by logging out), it will write out the corrupted history it still has in memory to disk, thereby recreating the history file at least as corrupt as before, probably with a few more corrupt lines added. So the proper fix is a bit more complicated: You need to replace the file with a symlink to /dev/null, make sure no jobs are currently running, close _all_ shells you might have open, then login again and remove the symlink. The command sequence would go like this:

   rm $HOME/.history
   ln -s /dev/null $HOME/.history

(now close all shells that might be open and wait for any running PBS job to finish, after that log in again)

  rm $HOME/.history

If you do not actually use the shell history, then just skip the last line - this will cause all attempts to write the history-file to go to the trash, thereby making sure the problem will not reappear.