While your .bash_history file can be easily cleared by a malicious person that’s gained access to your account, we can make it harder for them to achieve this.
Note: this works in bash v3 and up, so you should be pretty safe in today’s world of bash v3.3+ everywhere.
If you’d like to add the timestamping to all users on the machine, this is how we can do it.
The first file to edit is/etc/profile so this applies to all users to timestamp their logs. If you’re looking to keep this restricted to a single user, you can just add it to their .bashrc in their home directory (~username).
Here’s what you need to add:
HISTTIMEFORMAT="%D %T "
To get your current session to use the new settings:
source /etc/profile
Check it out your last 20 commands, datestamped:
history | tail -n20
I really do like BASH, and it’s really very powerful underneath it’s simple exterior.
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Excellent tip, think I’ll use it. Thanks =)