BASH history forever.

Posted by yarikoptic on Sat 2 Jul 2005 at 22:30

I would like to keep track of what, when and where I've done something in the shell for the rest of my Linux life. It is a reasonable wish to have all of my activites logged, so in the future I could check what I did, how I did, and when I did it. Of cause it imposes some security hazard if you type in your password by mistake while working in the shell prompt, so you should be carefull and have right permissions setup.

This article is excerpt from its original page where you can see how it evolved ;-)

The first solution would be to set HISTSIZE to be very big, but then I don't know how well your bash would behave - I believe it tries to keep them all in memory. But I want to have my bash fast and lightweighted! So it must be accomplished in another way.

Lets use a big file ~/.bash_history.archive (separate from HISTFILE=~/.bash_history). And then on exit from each bash session lets append new history lines to it. To accomplish that we need to remember how far in the history we were at the beginning of the session and at the end of session, so we could dump lines inbetween to our log file. The problem I've ran into is that it is impossible at the time of run of .bash{rc,_profile} to know status of history, thus I ended up scanning HISTFILE, thus I still can have some bugs becuase this way is unnatural.

To enable such historing you need merely to source a .bashrc_history from your ~/.bashrc. Optionally you can modify .inputrc to have shortcut to dump history without exiting shell. I provide source of the script directly in the article so it is available even if my website goes down (I hope it will not in the nearest future)

#!/bin/bash
#-------------------------- =+- Shell script -+= --------------------------
# @file      .bashrc_history.sh
# @date      Thu Mar 10 14:02:36 2005
# @brief
#
# CVS version control block - do not edit manually
#  $RCSfile: .bashrc_history,v $
#  $Source: /home/cvs/yoh/.bashrc_history,v $
#
# Created: Thu Mar 10 14:02:36 2005
#  Commited: $Date: 2005/03/24 14:24:28 $
#  Revision: $Revision: 1.7 $
#
#  Yaroslav Halchenko                                      CS@UNM, CS@NJIT
#  web:     http://www.onerussian.com                      & PSYCH@RUTGERS
#  e-mail:  yoh@onerussian.com                              ICQ#: 60653192
#
# DESCRIPTION (NOTES):
#   A script to be sourced from .bashrc to provide ways to archive all the
#   actions in infinitely long history file.
#   
#   To use, just place
#     'source .bashrc_history'   in ~/.bashrc
#
#     '$if Bash
#      # to exit through calling exit function which will archive the history
#      # next ones are optional: first is left for historical reasons
#      "\C-x\C-x": "exit\n"
#      "\C-x\C-w": "archive_history\n"
#      $endif'                   in ~/.inputrc
#
#   Then whenever you close bash (exit,logout or exit by pressing Ctrl-D
#   or Ctrl-X twice you will have a piece of current history added to
#   ~/.bash_history.archive
#
# SOURCE:
#   http://www.onerussian.com/Linux/.files/.bashrc_history
#
# LICENSE:  
#   Released under GNU Generic Public License. You should've received it with 
#   your GNU/Linux system. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
#   59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
#-----------------\____________________________________/------------------


if [ "$PS1" ] ; then # interactive shell
    export  \
	CURBASHSTART=$(grep -v -e "^[ \t]*$" -e "^\s*#" $HISTFILE 2>/dev/null /dev/null) \
	CURBASHDATE=$(date > $HISTORYOLD
	    history $(($HISTCMD-$CURBASHSTART-1)) | sed -e 's/^[ ]*[0-9][0-9]* [ ]*//g'  >> $HISTORYOLD
	    CURBASHSTART=$(($HISTCMD-1))
	fi
    }

    trap 'archive_history' EXIT

fi

P.S. There might be much better/safer way to reach the goal -- thus comments are very welcome

This article can be found online at the Debian Administration website at the following bookmarkable URL:

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/175