I figured it out. The homebrew 9.4.5 El Capitan bottle is bad because of
Xcode. I documented it in https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/issues/45405
On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> news@emmanuelsambo.com writes:
> > The following bug has been logged on the website:
> > Bug reference: 13733
> > Logged by: Emmanuel Sambo
> > Email address: news@emmanuelsambo.com
> > PostgreSQL version: 9.4.5
> > Operating system: Apple Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.1
> > Description:
>
> > Upgrading from PostgreSQL 9.4.4 to 9.4.5 deleted my entire psql history
> in
> > two of my ~/.psql_history-<db>
> > Looking at this file I can see:
> > - all the spaces are encoded as utf-8: "\040"
> > - each history entry is truncated at 1021 characters
>
> This probably means you accidentally switched from using libedit to
> libreadline, or vice versa, when you rebuilt Postgres. They're not
> very compatible as to history file format :-(
>
> regards, tom lane
>