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
In short:
export HISTTIMEFORMAT=’%F %T ‘
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
export HISTSIZE=5000
# 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”
I had to replace the double quotes with single quotes to get this working
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…
thanks for your trick 🙂
If you seek an easy way how to view, navigate, search and filter Bash history, you may want to a give a try to https://github.com/dvorka/hstr