After starting to use the bash, you quickly realize bash history is an invaluable asset. You can quickly search and find a previous command in order to remember when and what you have done. I was using a primitive way to archive the history with which I accumulated history of commands since 2008. The primitive setup has two parts. First part is a cron job:
0 13 3,11,24 * * /bin/cat ~/.bash_history > ~/.history_backup_`date +\%Y\%m\%d`
This cron job line means: on 3rd, 11th and 24th of each month at 1pm dump contents of .bash_history file to history backup file. By time, I ended up with 1-2 files per month.
Second part is couple bash functions to merge the archive.
oldhistory(){ for file in /home/alper/.history_backup_20*; do cat $file; echo; done | perl -ne 'if (/^#([0-9]{10}$)/){my $nextline=<>; $hash{$1}=$nextline }else{next}; END{print map { $hash{$_} } sort keys %hash}'; }
oldhistory-time(){ for file in /home/alper/.history_backup_20*; do cat $file; echo; done | perl -ne 'if (/^#([0-9]{10}$)/){ my $nextline=<>; $hash{$1}=$nextline }else{next}; END{print map {scalar localtime($_)."\t".$hash{$_}} sort keys %hash}'; }
However, just recently I noticed that the bash history file is trimmed and contained only 10 days of worth commands. Luckily, I recovered a backup of .bash_history file and didn’t lose much data. But, it was a wakeup call, my primitive system is prone to lose data without a notice. So, I started searching for a better solution to archive bash history.
When I search online I first came across this post. And then carried on searching and didn’t find anything that intrigues me. I also searched Github after which I got couple of aha moments. Bashhub can save your bash history in the cloud. That was very interesting and useful but I didn’t like the third party keeping the commands. There were couple more projects offering nice UI or advanced features (sqlite database for instance), such as history, hstr, bash-history-sqlite.
Finally, I got a good idea from this blog. Now, I’m testing this method and hoping that it would work with less problems.
export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a; history -n; if [ "$(id -u)" -ne 0 ]; then echo -e "$(date "+%Y-%m-%d.%H:%M:%S")\t$(hostname)\t$(pwd)\t$(history -p \!-1)" >> ~/.logs/bash-history-$(hostname)-$(date "+%Y-%m-%d").log; fi'
Update (2017-05-26): This code causes problem with
screen. Withinscreenthe command is not printed out and written correctly into bash-history file.
