On Tue, 18 Apr 2023 at 07:51, <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 05:29:43AM +0000, David wrote: > > On Tue, 18 Apr 2023 at 04:42, David Wright <[email protected]> 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. > > At least in bash, this doesn't seem necessary, as you are > only seeing an external representation: internally, bash > keeps the timestamp separate (as happens to the seq number, > too). Hi, it could well be unnecessary, I haven't played with it for a long time. I'm sure that there would have been some reason at the time why I chose to configure it that way, but it is so many years ago that I can't recall the reason. Guessing, it could just have been that I was lazy and doing something odd. Perhaps I wanted to dump the history output into a file, preserve the timestamps for some long-forgotten reason, and also put a shebang at the top of the file and run it again with minimal editing. Or maybe I wanted a known delimiter that I could strip automatically from the history output. I dunno. It also would have been several Bash versions ago, Bash 2 or 3, so perhaps the behaviour changed since I configured it. Anyway, if it isn't necessary now, there's no reason for me to advocate doing that, so I appreciate that you have let everyone know about that.
