Adding Date And Time To Your Bash History

This is a quick but handy addon (RedHat/CentOS) to enhance your bash history (bash > 3.0).

It comes in handy particularly if there are multiple people maintaining a given server (so you can see when a command was performed) or even if you are the sole maintainer, but can't remember exactly when you did or changed something.

Edit your /etc/bashrc and append to the bottom:

export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%h/%d - %H:%M:%S "

From next login instead of:

574  tail -f /var/log/maillog
575  mailq | tail -15
576  tail -f /var/log/maillog
577  less /var/log/maillog

you get:

1002  Apr/30 - 11:46:16 grep duncan /var/log/maillog
1003  Apr/30 - 14:17:40 passwd jduncan
1004  Apr/30 - 14:18:02 smbpasswd jduncan
1005  Apr/30 - 14:50:28 history 10

Hope this helps someone;)