Time Stamping Bash's command history
by Alpha01
It seems sharing your dot (.) config files is an act that all cool kids do these days. I won’t be sharing my Bash configs, however I will share one cool Bash shell trick of time stamping your command history, I use in all of my systems and servers. This is accomplished using the HISTTIMEFORMAT environment variable. Using standard date format control output syntax, it’s fairly easy to customize the command history time stamp to whatever time format output you prefer. Finally, in addition to using a customized HISTTIMEFORMAT value, I also add the HISTSIZE environment variable. This environment variable lets you override the default command history count to a much larger history count.
HISTSIZE=10000
HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%Y %T "
export HISTTIMEFORMAT
Usage
Sample output:
3318 21/04/2016 04:42:20 ls
3318 21/04/2016 04:43:29 vim .bashrc
3319 21/04/2016 04:43:37 vim .bash_profile
3320 21/04/2016 05:03:58 man date
3321 21/04/2016 05:07:43 history |tail
3322 21/04/2016 05:07:47 history |tail -5
bash