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Comment by bertmuthalaly | Hacker News Reader

When you’re debugging, especially a complex system, especially during an outage or postmortem, understanding when your commands executed relative to when your log lines appeared is really helpful.

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That's a good reason to have timestamps in the history, which you should.

Something like

  export HISTFILESIZE=
  export HISTSIZE=
  export HISTTIMEFORMAT="[%F %T] "
  shopt -s histappend

really ought to be default in bash.

It's not as clear why you need it in the interactive prompt.

I didn't make it quite as clear as I should: the reason to have it in the prompt is mostly so that you, or someone you're working with, can spot a trend you may not consciously think to look for if the timestamps weren't in front of you.

It sounds silly, but it has saved my butt more than once. Especially if you have bugs that e.g. only show up once per hour on the hour, and are otherwise fine.

That's a poor and hacky substitute of using Linux audit features. It's perhaps the right robustness/complexity trade off for my personal machine, but for work they likely already have audit features turned on and you can access the timing from there.

I think you need to put a number on "likely", here. 80% of all workplaces, maybe? Even that seems a little high. There are a surprising number of devs who have never even heard of auditd. It's just not the kind of thing most people come across in their day to day work unless they go digging for it, or come from a security or DevOps background or something.

sounds like your describing https://linux.die.net/man/1/ts

Oh, that's an interesting use case, alright.

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