Question: How do I find out what time I executed a command previously on Unix OS? The history command doesn’t display timestamp.
Answer: Set HISTTIMEFORMAT as shown below. Please note that there is a space before the last single-quotes.
$ export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '
After the above setting, history command will display timestamp in front of all commands. You can also search the history as shown below.
$ history | less search for the required command
351 2009-09-08 09:53:47 ls -lrt 352 2009-09-08 09:53:49 cd .. 353 2009-09-08 09:55:39 wget -mk -w 20 -P top5-1 -N 354 2009-09-08 10:00:04 gk 355 2009-09-08 10:00:07 cd Bash/Wget/ 356 2009-09-08 10:00:07 ls /wget
Note: For a full list of history command hacks, refer to: Mastering Linux command line history.
How to view the output in other time formats ?
To view all available date formats do the following.
$ man strftime
Based on the definition from strftime, following are few examples of date and time format that you can use in your history command.
To display AM / PM:
$ export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %r ' $ history 351 2009-09-08 09:53:47 PM ls -lrt 352 2009-09-08 09:53:49 PM cd ..
To display in dd-MON-YY time format:
$ export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%d-%b-%Y %r ' $ history 351 08-Sep-2009 09:53:47 PM ls -lrt 352 08-Sep-2009 09:53:49 PM cd ..
To display timezone:
$ export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%d-%b-%Y %r %Z' $ history 351 08-Sep-2009 09:53:47 PM PDT ls -lrt 352 08-Sep-2009 09:53:49 PM PDT cd ..
My name is Ramesh Natarajan. I will be posting instruction guides, how-to, troubleshooting tips and tricks on Linux, database, hardware, security and web. My focus is to write articles that will either teach you or help you resolve a problem. Read more about
Comments on this entry are closed.
Awesome ….. but If say some other system Admins have root access and i want to know not only execution time of command but from which IP the command was executed …..?
Regards,
MihirJ
I have tried this on other *nix variants without sucess. Are there metholodies to make this work in Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, etc?
Thanks so much Ramesh, i need something urgently i want to see who loged in and the commands he excuted is this possible?
To – Stephen Kagaruki
You can set different HISTFILE for each user.
Hi,
I have accidentally run the rm -rf command in terminal, due to have lost my impotent directory, Please help to recover steps.
The command is not working properly. It is displaying the date and time of todays where as I ran the command three before.
How come it is displaying the today date 🙁
@ Krishnan: It is valid only for the current session. It doesn’t hold good for previous sessions is what I believe.
Please do not tell people to export HISTTIMEFORMAT. It is a shell variable not an environment variable. Thanks.