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 ..
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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
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
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.