7 Tips - Tuning Command Line History in Bash - ShellHacks

7 Tips - Tuning Command Line History in Bash - ShellHacks

1. Add Date and Time to Bash History

Sometimes it would be very nice to know when some command got executed.

Set HISTTIMEFORMAT to print the time stamps associated with each history entry.

Append the following line to ~/.bashrc file:

export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%h %d %H:%M:%S "

Now, when you type history, it will show something like:

113  Jun 08 16:31:06 sudo ifconfig  114  Jun 08 16:31:10 top  115  Jun 08 16:31:19 ping 8.8.8.8  116  Jun 08 16:31:22 history  

2. Increase Bash History Size

Increase HISTSIZE – the number of commands to remember in the command history (the default value is 500).

export HISTSIZE=10000

Increase HISTFILESIZE – the maximum number of lines contained in the history file (the default value is 500).

export HISTFILESIZE=10000

3. Append Bash Commands to History File

Bash overwrites .bash_history file?

To append commands to the history file, rather than overwrite it, add the following line to ~/.bashrc:

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