How to Add Date And Time To Your Bash History file -- Debian Admin

How to Add Date And Time To Your Bash History file

Posted by Admin on May 9th, 2009

This is very useful tip if there are multiple people maintaining or using debian desktop,server or even if you are the maintainer, but can’t remember exactly when you did or changed something.

If you want to add this settings to globally use /etc/bash.bashrc

First you need to Edit your $HOME/.bashrc file

#vi $HOME/.bashrc

Add the following line

export HISTTIMEFORMAT=”%h/%d – %H:%M:%S “

Save and exit the file.

From next login instead of:

574 tail -f /var/log/maillog
575 mailq | tail -15
576 tail -f /var/log/maillog
577 less /var/log/maillog

you get:

1002 May/09 – 11:46:16 grep log /var/log/maillog
1003 Apr/09 – 14:17:40 passwd test
1004 Apr/09 – 14:50:28 history 15

Some more bash history tips

The most efficent way to search your history is to hit Ctrl R and type the start of the command. It will autocomplete as soon as there’s a match to a history entry, then you just hit enter

If you don’t want to save duplicate commands use the following option in your bashrc file ($HOME/.bashrc)

HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth

If you want to set the size of the history file use the following option in your bashrc file ($HOME/.bashrc)

HISTSIZE=500

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5 Responses to “How to Add Date And Time To Your Bash History file”

Robert Tulke Says:
May 11th, 2009 at 7:56 am
In short:

export HISTTIMEFORMAT=’%F %T ‘
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
export HISTSIZE=5000
Robert Tulke Says:
May 11th, 2009 at 8:32 am
# My .bashrc HISTORY

export HISTTIMEFORMAT=’%F %T ‘ # time entry for .bash_history
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups # eliminate continuous occurrences duplicates
export HISTSIZE=100000 # big big histfile
shopt -s histappend # append to history, don’t overwrite it

# Save and reload the history after each command finishes
export PROMPT_COMMAND=”history -a; history -r; $PROMPT_COMMAND”
rangalo Says:
May 11th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
I had to replace the double quotes with single quotes to get this working
Kostya Berger Says:
May 15th, 2009 at 12:18 am
I like those enhancements, guys!
Only, it gives me this “wise reminder” after every ENTER hit in the BASH prompt:
bash: history: cannot use more than one of -anrw

…although, I must admit it, I’m not in “Lenny”, I’m in OpenSuSE 11.1. But I guess BASH is distro-independent, eh? GPL software and all that…
nima0102 Says:
May 21st, 2009 at 8:11 pm
thanks for your trick