How can I append the date/time stamp to commands in history?

abefroman · 05-29-2008, 10:59 AM

How can I append the date/time stamp to commands in history?

Like this guy did:
[root~]# history | grep audit
240 2008-04-25 03:53:32 PM cat logs/initialaudit.log
243 2008-04-25 03:53:32 PM rm -f initialaudit
244 2008-04-25 03:53:32 PM rm -f initialaudit.1
247 2008-04-25 03:53:32 PM ./initialaudit
252 2008-04-25 03:53:32 PM cat initialaudit.log
273 2008-04-22 02:14:20 PM cat initialaudit.log
275 2008-04-22 02:16:55 PM cat initialaudit.log-1208841284
826 2008-04-24 07:25:12 PM history | grep audit
848 2008-04-24 10:12:14 PM history | grep audit
857 2008-04-24 10:15:50 PM vi initialaudit
867 2008-04-25 03:28:04 PM history | grep audit
871 2008-04-25 03:53:40 PM history | grep audit

beadyallen · 05-29-2008, 11:17 AM

I didn't know myself, but the bash man page turns up the HISTTIMEFORMAT environment variable. A quick google later and :

Code:

HISTTIMEFORMAT="%c # "
history

gets the job done. I learn something new every day

colucix · 05-29-2008, 11:21 AM

In bash 3.0 and newer you can define an environment variable called HISTTIMEFORMAT and put its value to a time format, using the time specification of the command date. Once you have defined this variable (you can put the definition in your ~/.bashrc) the history will be timestamped. For example

Code:

export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%Y%m%d %H:%M:%S "