CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshellhistory
diveintohacking
diveintohacking

Reputation: 5183

How can I see all of the bash history?

First let me show an example below.

In shell(1) I did the following command.

$ ping google.com
PING google.com (74.125.235.164) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from nrt19s12-in-f4.1e100.net (74.125.235.164): icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=2.85 ms
64 bytes from nrt19s12-in-f4.1e100.net (74.125.235.164): icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=3.42 ms

And after that, open another shell(2) and look at history.

$ history
 .
 .
 .
 8720  exit
 8721  clear
 8722  history

In this case, the shell can not see the history executed by shell(1), but I want to see all of the bash history in every shell.

So my question is how can I see all of the bash history? Does anybody know how to hack?

Thank you very much in advance!

Upvotes: 65

Views: 236030

Answers (6)

elad silver
elad silver

Reputation: 9675

history 1 worked for me..

This will show the history starting from line 1.

Upvotes: 6

DeanM
DeanM

Reputation: 4793

As several have noted, you need to use shopt -s histappend. Check by running shopt and verifying that histappend is 'on'.

To ensure that each command (across multiple concurrent shells) appears in the history for each of those shells, add this at the end of your .bashrc file:

# Skip if not an interactive shell
if [ -z "${PS1}" ]; then return; fi
export PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a; history -c; history -r; ${PROMPT_COMMAND}"

-a: appends the new history lines (history lines entered since the beginning of the current Bash session) to the history file.

-c: clears the history list.

-r: reads the current history file and append its contents to the history list.

Run source .bashrc or create new sessions and in several terminal windows enter the comment #Tn in each. Then on one terminal, enter history | tail -N to see the last N lines. You should see all of the comments entered on the different terminals.

It may be helpful to add the following to /etc/profile.d/bashrc.sh in order to get a timestamp on each line of the history:

if [ -z "${PS1}" ]; then return; fi
export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '

The result looks like this:

 [moi@laBoheme ~]$ history | tail -4
 3292  2019-01-22 12:41:25  # T1
 3293  2019-01-22 12:41:32  # T2
 3294  2019-01-22 12:41:44  # T3
 3295  2019-01-22 12:41:50  history | tail -4

Upvotes: 4

carl.anderson
carl.anderson

Reputation: 1118

You can install something like Advanced Shell History, which will log each command to a sqlite3 database. It comes with a tool for querying the database from the command line. https://github.com/barabo/advanced-shell-history

With this setup, you will have a unified view of command history across all sessions. You also get things like command history for the current working directory (or subtree), command exit code, command duration, etc.

Full disclosure: I wrote and maintain the tool.

Upvotes: 6

etusm
etusm

Reputation: 4210

cat ~/.bash_history

would also work, although I tend to just use 

vim ~/.bash_history

and then use /to search

Upvotes: 75

jfelipesp
jfelipesp

Reputation: 133

try this:

Edit your .bashrc and append this to it's end: 

shopt -s histappend
PROMPT_COMMAND="history -n; history -a"
unset HISTFILESIZE
HISTSIZE=2000

source: http://subbass.blogspot.com.br/2009/10/howto-sync-bash-history-between.html

Upvotes: 7

Carl Norum
Carl Norum

Reputation: 224904

You should look into the histappend shell option and the -a flag to history:

histappend

If set, the history list is appended to the file named by the value of the HISTFILE variable when the shell exits, rather than overwriting the file.

history

-a Append the "new" history lines (history lines entered since the beginning of the current bash session) to the history file.

If you put history -a into your PROMPT_COMMAND, you'll get an always-up-to-date .bash_history file.

Upvotes: 29

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