This entire blog post could be reduced to use the HISTFORMAT variable, which the author doesn't apparently know about. Put this in your ~/.bashrc: export H

This entire blog post could be reduced to use the HISTFORMAT variable, which the author doesn't apparently know about. Put this in your ~/.bashrc: export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M.%S | ' An example of the "history | tail" results: $ history | tail 50198 2016-05-31 10:15.57 | cd docker 50199 2016-05-31 10:16.03 | cd rpms/ 50200 2016-05-31 10:16.11 | scp docker* omniscience:/tmp/ 50201 2016-05-31 10:14.06 | screen -ls 50202 2016-05-31 08:33.34 | screen -x 50203 2016-05-31 19:06.53 | grep HIST .bashrc 50204 2016-05-31 19:07.46 | history | tail 50205 2016-05-31 19:08.10 | task ls 50206 2016-05-31 19:08.23 | docker ps -qa 50207 2016-05-31 19:08.30 | history | tail A few from my bashrc: $ grep HIST .bashrc HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:ignorespace # for setting history length see HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE in bash(1) export HISTFILESIZE=99999 export HISTSIZE=99999 export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M.%S | ' export HISTIGNORE="ls:exit:history:[bf]g:jobs" And then a cronjob that simply backs up the data.