On Tue, 18 Apr 2023 at 04:42, David Wright <deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote:
> There is an option to timestamp entries in the history file. I've > never used it, nor heard of its being used. That might disambiguate > things if you ever suspect it might happen again. Hi, on my machines I use Bash as interactive shell, with: HISTTIMEFORMAT=: %Y%m%d_%H%M%S ; That provides a couple of benefits: 1) it writes a commented Unix timestamp with each addition to the ~/.bash_history file, so that the history file not only logs what commands were run interactively, but also when. 2) when I run the 'history' command, the outpt is formatted like this: 501 : 20230418_151124 ; help history 502 : 20230418_151406 ; env 503 : 20230418_151749 ; history The colon and semicolon allow the timestamp to function as a no-operation command. That means that history expansion can still function, for example entering !502 interactively will run line number 502, but only the 'env' that comes after the semicolon will have any effect.
