Top tip for unix users

If you do a lot of work from the command line on a unix box, this is the single most useful tip I know. Put this in your .bashrc (adjust to suit if you use a different shell)

export HISTFILE=~/.history/`date +%Y%m%d`.hist

Its effect is to create a new history file every day. Which means that, over time, you build up a complete log of everything you’ve ever done. Meaning that, if you ever find yourself thinking ‘what was that command I ran, last time this broke? Was it something to do with strace ?’ , you can just do ‘grep strace ~/.history/*’ and find the answer.

Setting HISTSIZE to something large like 100000 is a good idea, too, so that you capture everything. I’ve got about 6 months worth of history now, and it amounts to about half a MB – so not likely to cause a problem storage-wise. And it’s been a life-saver several times over already.

Chris May : 07 Mar 2007 14:36 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem