Bash history with timestamps

Question

I would like to keep timestamps on the commands logged in my Bash $HISTFILE, is it possible?

I did not manage to set it up using man bash as an information source.

My other options are as follows:

function thebanana() {
  local -r -a bash_commands=(
    "ls"
    # ... more coconut commands
  )
  for bash_command in "${bash_commands[@]}"; do
    printf "${bash_command}"
    printf ":"
  done
}
export HISTFILE=banana
export HISTIGNORE="$(thebanana)"
export HISTSIZE=999999
export HISTFILESIZE=999999999
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:erasedups

I should have mentioned I am on OS X Mountain Lion (sigh). uname -a gives me:

Darwin CoconutMac.local 12.2.0 Darwin Kernel Version 12.2.0: Sat Aug 25 00:48:52 PDT 2012; root:xnu-2050.18.24~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

and echo $BASH_VERSION gives me:

3.2.48(1)-release

Tried adding this:

export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%b %d %I:%M:%S %p '

and it only prefixes this kind of timestamps to commands:

#1349057791

I try echoing back the variable (echo $HISTTIMEFORMAT), it has the right value.

Interesting!

I even removed .profile completely to debug this. Still only funny timestamps:

#1349058320

I don't know how to further troubleshoot this... :(

Solution: I was using a script that reads the $HISTFILE directly, not the history built-in so the epoch-based timestamp (secs since Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970) was not being translated using the date formatting string. Plain-old history works fine, I'll use that instead.

Answer 1

Yes, put this in ~/.bashrc :

export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '

Then, run the following commands :

. ~/.bashrc
history

It will look like this :

 (...)
 5200  2012-09-30 23:55:37 find -printf '%Ts %f\n'
 5201  2012-10-01 00:00:58 ls
 5202  2012-10-01 00:03:45 cd
 (...)

Explanations of the output :

• first col is the unique id
• second one is the date, third is the hour
• latest is your command line