attie/hist

Bash History Lookup Tool

hist - Bash History Lookup Tool

"Bash history is documentation"

This utility facilitates the interrogation of bash history.

Setup

Because an infinite history can quickly become unmanagable, I'd recommend using a new file each month. This can be achieved using the following example in your ~/.bashrc.

function history_file_get() {
  # return the full path to the current history file
  # the output will update each month - even if your terminal is running for a long time
  echo "${HISTORY_OVERRIDE:-${HOME}/.bash_history/local/history_$(date +'%Y-%m' "${@}")}"
}

function history_file_append() {
  # append new items to the history file
  local histfile="$(history_file_get "${@}")"
  local histdir="${histfile%/*}"
  [ ! -d "${histdir}" ] && mkdir -p "${histdir}"
	history -a "${histfile}"
}

function history_file_read() {
  # read items from the history file
  local histfile="$(history_file_get "${@}")"
  local histdir="${histfile%/*}"
  [ -d "${histdir}" ] && history -r "${histfile}"
}

# don't limit the size of history files
HISTSIZE=-1
HISTFILESIZE=-1

# if this is unset, then you won't have timestamps in your history...
HISTTIMEFORMAT="| %Y-%m-%d %a %l:%M:%S %P |  "

# read last month's history too
history_file_read -d "1 month ago"
history_file_read

PROMPT_COMMAND='history_file_append'

Usage

Out of the box, hist will inspect the last 5 months worth of history files, and print matching lines.

The output can be filtered by adding keywords to the command line, only lines that contain all keywords will be displayed.

The following example is taken from a Docker container, having run the setup above.

root@8798116766c8:~# ./hist read
/root/.bash_history/history_2019-06   (2x)
2019-06-06 15:41:46  |    1x | function history_file_read() {   local histfile="$(history_file_get)";   local histdir="$(dirname "${histfile}")";   [ -d "${histdir}" ] && history -n "${histfile}"; }
2019-06-06 15:41:46  |    1x | history_file_read

root@8798116766c8:~# ./hist read local
/root/.bash_history/history_2019-06   (1x)
2019-06-06 15:41:46  |    1x | function history_file_read() {   local histfile="$(history_file_get)";   local histdir="$(dirname "${histfile}")";   [ -d "${histdir}" ] && history -n "${histfile}"; }