Comments for Daily history files for Bash

Comment from Yann on 2006-05-21

2006-05-21T08:39:06Z

what about keeping a smaller HISTSIZE, and using a cron instead to populate .history with backups from .bash_history ?

This way you shouldn't have duplicates in your backup while keeping the usual continuous .history file for your day-to-day history scrubbing.

Comment from reeses on 2006-08-27

2006-08-28T00:10:51Z

I needed to be a snoop and log everything a particular user was doing and keep multiple login shell sessions separate. As a result, I added the time of day to $HISTFILE.

Then I wondered why it didn't work. I logged in, I su -'d, and the file never appeared. I could touch the file and create it in ~ from the command line.

Finally, I added the touch ~/blah to the .profile, and received an error message. Changing ~ to the full path was sufficient to solve the problem.

This obviously isn't a general problem (~ is not a traditional home, but more like having ~apache be /var/apache), but because bash appears to fail silently if $HISTFILE is not "valid" for whatever reason, a quick "touch $HISTFILE" added to the .profile should give more helpful diagnostic output.

Comment from Anonymous coward on 2007-03-01

2007-03-01T11:27:22Z

This only works if you crack open a fresh terminal everyday right? I've had the same terminal open for about 3 weeks now...

Comment from scruzia on 2007-03-03

2007-03-03T08:44:41Z

I usually have 3 to 5 terminal windows open at once. Does Bash manage to share a history file in that situation? Zsh doesn't (as of v4.2.3 on Mac OS X). So here's what I ended up doing in one of my zsh startup files:



tdc_day=$( tdc_sh | sed 's/_.*//' )  # my date stamper

tty=$( tty | sed 's,/dev/,,' )   # tty always prepends the useless "/dev/".

export HISTFILE=$h/zsh.histories/zh.$tdc_day.$tty

export HISTSIZE=100000

Google for "gigo beh" to see more about my date stamp format.