Re: Bash History Behavior Suggestion

[Martin D Kealey]

sorry, I meant HISTTIMEFORMAT rather than HISTTIMEFMT

On Tue, 20 Aug 2024 at 14:58, Martin D Kealey <martin@kurahaupo.gen.nz>
wrote:

> The following suggestions, or close approximations, can all be implemented
> using the existing facilities.
>
> On Tue, 20 Aug 2024 at 05:52, <support@eggplantsd.com> wrote:
>
>> I would suggest:
>>
>> 1. Append to history file immediately on each command.
>>
>
> Easily done by putting `history -a` into `PROMPT_COMMAND`
>
> 2. Restrict up-arrow completion to the history of present session.
>>
>
> That's easy. Simply don't use `history -r` in your .bashrc or
> /etc/bash/bashrc.
>
> (Unfortunately modifying the latter will require admin access to your
> host, so choose a distro that does NOT include `history -r` among its
> system-wide shell start-up files.)
>
> 3. Add column(s) to the history file to identify the session the command
>> came from (pty, pid, etc).
>>
>
> I simply write the history for each session into a separate file; I have
>
>  HISTFILE=$HOME/.bash_history.d/$EPOCHSECONDS.$TTY.$$
>
> That way I can simply use a pager such as `less` to read the file I'm
> interested in. If I want to see the timestamps, I can use:
>
>   ( HISTTIMEFMT="%F,%T " HISTFILE={other-history-file} ; history -c ;
> history -r ; history ) | less
>
> 4. Add options to the 'history' command to toggle between session-local
>> and global reporting.
>>
>
> I simply use separate commands to view the current session's history vs
> all sessions.
> I generally prefer not to interleave multiple sessions, but on the rare
> occasion when I do want this, I can simply use:
>
> ( cd $HOME/.bash_history.d ; HISTTIMEFORMAT="%F,%T " ; for  HISTFILE in *
> ; do ( history -c ; history -r ; history ) ; done ) | sort | less
>
> If I did this often enough to actually care, I'd wrap it in a function.
>