adding date to bash history command

Coming from Solaris to Linux, one thing I’ve missed for years was that the Linux bash history command doesn’t show timestamps. Thanks to my colleague, Shinn, I learned about this config settings that can go into .bashrc to solve that problem, and add a few other useful settings, as well. In Debian, the (system) file to modify is /etc/bash.bashrc, and /etc/bashrc in CentOS. Of course, user can modify her/his .bashrc.

export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '

Before:


  355  vi .bashrc
  356  history
  357  history | wc -l

After:

  355  2013-03-15 10:07:03 vi .bashrc
  356  2013-03-15 10:07:17 history
  357  2013-03-15 10:07:48 history | wc -l
  358  2013-03-15 10:13:43 cat .bashrc
  359  2013-03-15 10:57:46 exit
  360  2013-03-15 13:22:12 history
  361  2013-03-15 13:22:35 more .bashrc

export HISTSIZE=1000 – extends history from the default 500 most recent commands, to 1000.

export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups – removes duplicates from history
export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth – I’m not sure about this one.

Please add other config options you find useful.

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