Append bash history in real-time and change output to show date and time of the command execution

Bash history can be very useful to re-trace steps performed on the system, but one of the issues is that commands are not logged in real-time but after ending a session. Also history output does not include date and time which is really useful for debugging.

In order to solve this you will need to append 3 lines to your ~/.bashrc file:

shopt -s histappend
PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a;$PROMPT_COMMAND"
export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '

In order for this to become active you need either to log out and log back in our execute:

source ~/.bashrc

After this all your commands will be logged in real-time and output of history command will have date & time information in following format:

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS history