What is endless bash history?

pestophagous/endless_bash_history is a twist on Eli Bendersky's original idea

Eli Bendersky is the inventor of this idea. He explains the rationale better than I can: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/06/11/keeping-persistent-history-in-bash

This 'pestophagous' implementation adds two additional columns to every bash command that gets stored in the history.

Additional columns are:

• hostname
• current working directory

You'll know every bash command you've ever run. And you'll know which directory you were in when you ran it!

This is a sampling of what it looks like:

2016-04-24 17:44:12 host:ubuntubox {/home/user/m/jr/2016-04-17} | ls
2016-04-24 17:44:14 host:ubuntubox {/home/user/m/jr/2016-04-17/test_area} | cd test_area/
2016-04-24 17:44:14 host:ubuntubox {/home/user/m/jr/2016-04-17/test_area} | ls
2016-04-24 17:44:17 host:ubuntubox {/home/user/m/jr/2016-04-17/test_area/test-app-1} | cd test-app-1/
2016-04-24 17:44:17 host:ubuntubox {/home/user/m/jr/2016-04-17/test_area/test-app-1} | ls
2016-04-24 17:59:19 host:ubuntubox {/home/user/m/jr/2016-04-17/test_area/test-app-1} | echo $JAVA_HOME
2016-05-02 18:45:38 host:ip-192-168-48-243.ec2.internal {/Users/someone} | /Applications/DiffMerge.app/Extras/diffmerge.sh ~/.bash_history ~/.emacs.d/lisp/doremi.el
2016-05-02 18:48:53 host:ip-192-168-48-243.ec2.internal {/Users/someone/.emacs.d/lisp} | cd .emacs.d/lisp/
2016-05-02 18:49:20 host:ip-192-168-48-243.ec2.internal {/Users/someone/.emacs.d/lisp} | ls .git/hooks/
2016-05-04 10:41:32 host:ip-192-168-48-243.ec2.internal {/Users/someone/gr} | brew install maven
2016-05-04 10:42:04 host:ip-192-168-48-243.ec2.internal {/Users/someone/gr} | brew install redis
2016-05-04 10:44:02 host:ip-192-168-48-243.ec2.internal {/Users/someone/gr} | brew info redis
2016-05-04 10:44:28 host:ip-192-168-48-243.ec2.internal {/Users/someone/gr} | brew info redis > info_redis.txt
2016-05-04 10:44:30 host:ip-192-168-48-243.ec2.internal {/Users/someone/gr} | cat info_redis.txt
2016-05-04 13:22:59 host:ip-192-168-48-243.ec2.internal {/Users/someone/gr/fivefour/circle-api} | mvn jetty:run
2016-05-04 13:24:06 host:ip-192-168-48-243.ec2.internal {/Users/someone/gr/fivefour/circle-api} | (mvn jetty:run 2>&1 ) | tee ~/output.txt

...
... much more history ...
...

2019-10-01 22:54:51 host:qemuguest4 {/home/ubuntu} | echo /home/ubuntu/Qt5.12.0/5.12.0/gcc_64/lib/
2019-10-01 22:55:06 host:qemuguest4 {/home/ubuntu} | export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/home/ubuntu/Qt5.12.0/5.12.0/gcc_64/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
2019-10-01 22:55:09 host:qemuguest4 {/home/ubuntu/thesharewithhost} | cd thesharewithhost/
2019-10-01 22:55:10 host:qemuguest4 {/home/ubuntu/thesharewithhost} | ./bookmark
2019-10-01 22:55:47 host:someone-laptop {/home/someone/MY_QEMU_SHARE_MOUNT} | cp /home/someone/acme/acme/config/data/config.pbtxt acme/config/data/
2019-10-01 22:56:10 host:qemuguest4 {/home/ubuntu/thesharewithhost} | ./mytestapp
2019-10-01 22:56:23 host:someone-laptop {/home/someone/acme} | cdv
2019-10-01 22:56:36 host:someone-laptop {/home/someone/acme} | bazel-bin/acme/executables/apps/mytestapp/mytestapp

Knowing the hostname is helpful if you install this history-gathering feature on multiple hosts.

Multi-host Caveat

CAVEAT: This project (as of Oct 2019) does not contain any scripts/tools for merging endless histories of multiple machines. Such scripts/tools exist (in my private collection), but they are very sloppy and not yet ready for sharing. You'll have better success rolling your own at this time.

INSTALL Steps:

git clone https://github.com/pestophagous/endless_bash_history.git ebh_root
cd ebh_root/
source bin/install.sh

At this point, you should find that $HOME/.persistent_history exists (in your home directory).

From now on, you can grep through $HOME/.persistent_history any time you need to remember a bash command you ran. It will be automatically appended to, thanks to a snippet or two of code added to your .bashrc file. (Look at this repo's "for_bashrc" to see what gets added.)

"Next steps" / Advanced / Proceed-using-your-own-bash-skills

If you want to periodically "push" your endless history, this section contains one idea to get you started. "Push" could mean that you copy it to an external drive or a network drive for backup, or that you upload to some cloud storage, or anything else you want to programmatically make happen.

Suggested starting point:

1. Put bin/push_endless_bash.sh on your $PATH (and make sure the sh file is executable)
2. Create an executable file named endless_bash_pluggable_push and put that on your path, too

You must then populate your executable file "endless_bash_pluggable_push" with logic that you write.

Whenever you call push_endless_bash.sh, it will gather up all new entries added to $HOME/.persistent_history since your last "push", and it will put those in a file and then invoke your endless_bash_pluggable_push with the filename as the only argument. By populating your executable file "endless_bash_pluggable_push" with custom logic, this is how you can push it to the cloud or to some other backup medium.

Look inside push_endless_bash.sh for details.