Display date & time in Linux history command

One nifty tip to enable timestamps in the history command in Linux.

When you enter the history command on a Linux server or macOS terminal, you only see the list of commands but not the date &/or time when those commands were executed. It looks similar to this.

shashank-mbp:~ admin$ history
    4  sudo su
    5  sudo su
    6  sudo su
    7  sudo su
    8  clear
    9  sudo su
   10  fish

That is why I use this simple but very useful tip to display the timestamps against all the commands in the output of the history command. Below is how to enable it.

• Open .bash_profile or /etc/profile file (read the note below).

Edit /etc/profile file to enable the timestamps for all the users. If you want to enable it for a particular user, then edit .bash_profile file of that user.

• Add the below line.

export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T "

%d — date

%m — month

%y — year

%T — time (in hh:mm:ss format)

• Source the file. You can also log out & log back in to reflect the changes.

shashank-mbp:~ admin$ source .bash_profile

If you type history command now, it will neatly display the timestamps against each command.

507  03/12/20 15:43:08 clear
508  03/12/20 15:43:09 vim .bash_profile
509  03/12/20 15:52:02 source .bash_profile
510  03/12/20 15:52:05 vim .bash_profile
511  03/12/20 15:54:11 uptime
512  03/12/20 15:56:09 history

Even though it looks trivial, it is one of the very first things that I do on a newly created Linux server.

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