Hello,

I am a student running an experiment remotely on a linux machine. In the event of a problem I need to check what commands I may have sent to the computer (may be weeks in the past) which coincided with the time of the problem.

As well as a record of the commands I sent I also need to record the exact date/time each command was sent and the user that sent the command.

Does any one know of a good way of setting up such a monitoring system?

Cheers,

Chris.

Hi,

use tcsh

Happy Penguins!

You can control the behaviour of command history by means of some environment variables. For example
HISTTIMEFORMAT - if set and not null determine the format of timestamp associated to an entry in the history (this is what you are looking for)
HISTFILE - is the name of the file in which command history is saved ($HOME/.bash_history by default)
HISTSIZE - is the max number of entries to store in the history, and so on...
Since you are looking for recording over a long period you may consider to backup the history file on a regular basis. Anyway it is a common practice to empty the history file every time you log out from a remote machine (for security reasons). In this case you may consider to automatically backup the history file every time you logout (e.g. append the current content of .bash_history to a file).

Edit: you can find all information related to history by issuing "info history".

Thank you. That has done the trick.