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How and Why to Log Your Bash History

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Re: How and Why to Log Your Bash History

#41

Post by Terretta »

yomly wrote: post #32

I'm a big fan of saving history - trying to remember all the shell based commands we use is a nightmare! If you're using zsh, a tip I picked up from [0] was to alias all your common commands like 'cd', 'ls' 'fg'... to: ' cd' ' ls' ' fg' ... Then add the following line to your zshrc to ignore lines prepended with a space: setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE This keeps your history cleaner from any ls, cd, fg inputs you use. [0]…

Dropping the ls, ok. But cd conveys relevant context.

It would be really clever if a series of cd/ls rolled into a final absolute path cd so history shows context for the subsequent batch of commands.

Re: How and Why to Log Your Bash History

#42

Post by rietta »

matt-attack wrote: post #36

Just a point on security, many advocate that logging commands is a major security weakness. Similar to why SSH now hashes entries in ~/.ssh/known_hosts by default. The idea is you don't want to provide hints on which remote systems you connect to, as these can offer a springboard to the intruder.

And one has to be mindful of that time you ran: export AWS_CREDENTIAL=xpXfLVsY/77Nr+m1mKmys719h0m2z2BCYSv9d5r

That is then an increased risk of breach because it is kept around for a long time. YMMV. Defense in depth, don't use production secrets in development, etc, etc.

Re: How and Why to Log Your Bash History

#43

Post by rietta »

matt-attack wrote: post #36

Just a point on security, many advocate that logging commands is a major security weakness. Similar to why SSH now hashes entries in ~/.ssh/known_hosts by default. The idea is you don't want to provide hints on which remote systems you connect to, as these can offer a springboard to the intruder.

And one has to be mindful of that time you ran: export AWS_CREDENTIAL=xpXfLVsY/77Nr+m1mKmys719h0m2z2BCYSv9d5r

That is then an increased risk of breach because it is kept around for a long time. YMMV. Defense in depth, don't use production secrets in development, etc, etc.

Re: How and Why to Log Your Bash History

#44

Post by jerf »

efyx wrote: post #8

Why logging to a file when you could just set the HITSIZE variable in your .bashrc ? (plus this will give you ctrl+r search which is a must)

I have many shells open at once, sometimes dozens. Only one of them "wins" when saving history. If Bash has out-of-the-box support for merging multiple shell history, it's not obvious in the man page. And I have them open precisely because they're different contexts and I don't really want them sharing history. If you want a log of everything you run, you need to make it some other way.

So, basically, in combination with sp332's and raldi's points, the answer is that it is completely not the same.

Re: How and Why to Log Your Bash History

#45

Post by szymon_k »

gdulli wrote: post #34

I go one big step further than this and log everything that comes across the screen. One time it saved me from a crontab -r that wiped out a 100+ line crontab. I had viewed it recently so I just copied it out of my history. On a day to day basis it's more about looking up old queries I typed out, the results of those queries at that time, bash commands and their results, the state of a file I edited at a certain time…

Could you share a gist of that? Would love similar thing in my toolset!

Re: How and Why to Log Your Bash History

#46

Post by saurik »

wolfhumble wrote: post #38
saurik wrote: post #29

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10695305 ^ Here is my comment on a previous post for how I am logging all of my bash history in a logical manner (keeping track of terminals and timestamps, etc.) to an sqlite database.

Where/how do you call this script?

I just stuff that in by .bashrc.

Re: How and Why to Log Your Bash History

#47

Post by superuser2 »

Terretta wrote: post #41
yomly wrote: post #32

I'm a big fan of saving history - trying to remember all the shell based commands we use is a nightmare! If you're using zsh, a tip I picked up from [0] was to alias all your common commands like 'cd', 'ls' 'fg'... to: ' cd' ' ls' ' fg' ... Then add the following line to your zshrc to ignore lines prepended with a space: setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE This keeps your history cleaner from any ls, cd, fg inputs you use. [0]…

Dropping the ls, ok. But cd conveys relevant context. It would be really clever if a series of cd/ls rolled into a final absolute path cd so history shows context for the subsequent batch of commands.

Can you not set the template line for log entries? Seems like $(pwd) could go alongside time stamp.

Re: How and Why to Log Your Bash History

#48

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

szymon_k wrote: post #45
gdulli wrote: post #34

I go one big step further than this and log everything that comes across the screen. One time it saved me from a crontab -r that wiped out a 100+ line crontab. I had viewed it recently so I just copied it out of my history. On a day to day basis it's more about looking up old queries I typed out, the results of those queries at that time, bash commands and their results, the state of a file I edited at a certain time…

Could you share a gist of that? Would love similar thing in my toolset!

not the OP, but this discussion might be helpful

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/25639/how-to-automat...

I have been wondering about doing something like this as well

Re: How and Why to Log Your Bash History

#49

Post by spike021 »

A long time ago I set my history file to save up to the previous 1000 commands, and I ended up mostly learning grep for the first time because I wanted to search quickly for various recent commands. Stuff like "history | grep _some ip_" or things like that.

Storing the entire history would no doubt be helpful, but I feel similarly to what other people have said so far, which is that it may not be the safest thing to do? Probably depends on usecase.

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