Bashrc

July 19, 2021

Bash History

Knowledge is power, and your bash history is prior knowledge. By default, only the last 1,000 commands are stored. So let's fix that!

# view your current settings
grep ^HIST ~/.bashrc

Let's set HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE to 100,000:

# back it up just in case
cp ~/.bashrc ~/.bashrc.bak
# replace the old values
sed -i -e 's/^\(HISTSIZE=\|HISTFILESIZE=\)[0-9]\+/\1100000/g' ~/.bashrc
# confirm what changed
diff ~/.bashrc ~/.bashrc.bak

The other thing I like to see is WHEN I ran a particular command. We can accomplish this simply by defining the HISTTIMEFORMAT environment variable.

echo 'export HISTTIMEFORMAT="[%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S] "' >> ~/.bashrc

Have a look: $ history | tail -1

  545  [2021-07-19 10:38:22] history | tail -1

Beautiful.