How To Configure Bash History Date and Time in Linux

Overview

At times you would like to audit engineers commands executed at specific date and time on the server(s) especially wherein servers are running critical applications and engineers don’t execute unauthorized commands in a bash shell.

Other scenario is the view the commands that have been executed when you have to compile an RCA document.

Applies To

Tested on RHEL 7, CentOS 7 with bash profile

Pre-Requisites

·        None

Bash History Setting

To view the currently configured setting of the bash history run the command below;

cat .bash_profile | grep HISTTIMEFORMAT

Note: if history not configured nothing would displayed.

View History

To list the commands executed previously, run the command below; in this case the date and time is not displayed.

Bash Attributes

Bash history attributes that can be configured and its purpose is as per below table.

Attribute	Display
%d	Day
%m	Month
%y	Year
%T	Time

Configure Bash

To display the date and time of this commands history, we need to reconfigure “~/.bash_profile” with HISTTIMEFORMAT and export the environment variable.

echo 'export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T "' >> ~/.bash_profile

After re-configuring the profile, logout and login back to view the date and time of each command executed run command;

history

SlideShare Information

Step by step guide is uploaded.

How To Configure Bash History Date and Time in Linux from VCP Muthukrishna