Otago Study Group SYSKA

One of the most useful additions to my .bashrc file that I have found is the addition of this command to save all the commands that I run into a log file.

export PROMPT_COMMAND='if [ "$(id -u)" -ne 0  ]; then echo "$(date "+%Y-%m-%d.%H:%M:%S") $(pwd) $(history 1)" >> ~/.logs/bash-history-$(date "+%Y-%m-%d").log; fi'

This is super useful because it saves a new file for each day of all of the timestamped commands that I have run and the directory I was in when I ran them.

This when coupled with grep enables a powerful way to search back in time for previous commands

i.e. if I want to find all the times I have run the ‘ls’ command

grep 'ls' ~/.logs/*

So if you want to have it for yourself:

Create the .logs directory required

mkdir ~/.logs

Open up your .bashrc file

nano ~/.bashrc

then on a new line paste in: export PROMPT_COMMAND=‘if [ “$(id -u)” -ne 0 ]; then echo “$(date”+%Y-%m-%d.%H:%M:%S“) $(pwd) \((history 1)" >> ~/.logs/bash-history-\)(date”+%Y-%m-%d").log; fi’

and save with ctrl + o and exit with ctrl + x

Then to get it working you either need to quit and reopen you shell or

source ~/.bashrc

and your commands will then start being logged into files in the ~/.logs directory

Here is the original post that I found this useful information in https://spin.atomicobject.com/2016/05/28/log-bash-history/