Bash

Put A TimeStamp on Bash History

Sometimes, it is very helpful to have a timestamp on bash history, that way it’s easier to know the exact time a command was executed.

To put a timestamp on history, run the following command;

HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T "

That’s all. Next time you run the history command, the history will display with timestamp.

Hope someone finds it useful.

Copying a file to multiple locations

I thought this was cool enough to share.  I have not had to use it however so I doubt it is all that useful 😉

xargs -n 1 cp -v foo.txt<<<"/tmp1/ /tmp2/ /tmp3/"

Here we are copying one file named foo.txt to multiple directories called /tmp/1/, /tmp/2/, and /tmp/3 using xargs.  The xargs command construct argument list(s) and execute utility such as cp.

If you find a use for this let me know.  Backup copies seems useful but other than that…?

 

Timestamping your bash_history

I use this all the time and occasionally find a server that isn’t configured to timestamp the bash_history. It seemed like something I should preserve here for future reference.

Adding a timestamp is really simple, just execute the following:

echo ‘export HISTTIMEFORMAT=”%d/%m/%y %T “‘ >> ~/.bash_profile ; source ~/.bash_profile

That’s it, now the history command is more useful.