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Adding the time stamp to the History Command


Adding the time stamp to the History Command

Summary

The History command does not output the time stamp with the log of the most recently executed commands.

To Display Date and Time

To do so, run the following command in the terminal:

Please note that there is a space before the last double-quotes.

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HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T "

If you want to permanently append this changes, add the following line to the ~/.bashrc file:

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export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T "

or

Run the command, it will be adding ~/.bashrc file

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echo 'export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T "' >> ~/.bashrc

Then, from the terminal, run the following:

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source ~/.bashrc

Now, to see history, type:

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history

Sample outputs:

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533 07/05/17 13:40:07 cd /var/www/html/
534 07/05/17 13:40:07 ls
535 07/05/17 13:40:07 cd techpulsetoday.com/
536 07/05/17 13:40:07 wp plugin list
537 07/05/17 13:40:07 wp package list
538 07/05/17 13:40:07 wp cache flush
539 07/05/17 13:40:07 wp help package
540 07/05/17 13:40:07 wp package update
541 07/05/17 13:40:07 wp package list
542 07/05/17 13:40:07 wp size database
543 07/05/17 13:40:07 wp transient delete --all
544 07/05/17 13:40:07 wp revisions clean
545 07/05/17 13:40:07 wp size database
546 07/05/17 13:40:07 wp db optimize
547 07/05/17 13:40:07 wp db repair
548 07/05/17 13:40:07 ls
549 07/05/17 13:40:07 nano wp-config.php

To Display dd-MON-YY & AM/PM & Timezone

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HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %r %Z "

Sample Outputs:

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533 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST cd /var/www/html/
534 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST ls
535 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST cd techpulsetoday.com/
536 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp plugin list
537 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp package list
538 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp help package
539 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp package update
540 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp package list
541 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp size database
542 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp cache flush
543 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp size database
544 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp transient delete
545 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp transient delete --all
546 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp revisions clean
547 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp size database
548 07/05/17 01:40:07 PM IST wp db optimize

Here’s an explanation of the commands and switches:

Commands Explanation
history GNU History Library
HISTTIMEFORMAT Environmental Variable
%d The day of the month as a decimal number (range 01 to 31)
%m The month as a decimal number (range 01 to 12)
%y The year as a decimal number without a century (range 00 to 99)
%T The time in 24-hour notation (%H:%M:%S)
%r The time in a.m. or p.m. notation. In the POSIX locale, this is equivalent to %I:%M:%S %p
%Z The timezone name or abbreviation
source In short, send the contents of the file to the shell
.bashrc Is a shell script that BASH runs whenever it is started interactively

Reference

For more info type the following commands:

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man bash
help history
man 3 strftime

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