Hi, I had initially been confused by the HISTTIMEFORMAT variable thinking it could be used to change what was written to the history file, rather than the output of the history command.
Obviously it would have to be a separate variable, but the ability to add extra info to the history file would be very useful to me. Given the pid and pwd you can effectively track sessions, and know where you invoked a command in addition to when. As a simple change, just statically appending the bash pid such that the history file looks like: #1323582935 217 command would enable constructing a session and inferring the pwd by checking for cd/pushd/popd commands (assuming no other aliases or scripts are used to chdir). Note as a hack I've tried using a trap DEBUG to call out to sed and add this info to the penultimate line of .bash_history (race conditions shouldn't be a problem if only one human is using the same account), but as the history file grows very large this can cause a visible lag. Alternately I could write a special-purpose command which jumps directly to the end of the file, but it would be really nice if bash just did this for you. Thanks, -- Alex
