History

Track, Analyze, and Graph your Bash History!

Requirements

• Bash (duh)
• Ruby (>= 2.3.3)
• R (>= 3.3.3)

Setup

Bash History

I customized a few of my .bashrc configs to work better with this:

# Don't store lines starting with space in the history.
HISTCONTROL=ignorespace

# Append to the history file, don't overwrite it.
shopt -s histappend

# Sizes for the .bash_history file.
HISTSIZE=5000
HISTFILESIZE=25000

Cron job

To make things easier, I set up a cron job to automatically run the save.sh script periodically (in my case, once every hour). The crontab entry looks like:

0 * * * * /path/to/directory/save.sh

NOTE: You must add the crontab entry to your user's crontab (such as by running crontab -e), as the save script relies on $HOME being set to your home directory.

Usage

• status.sh gives you the current number of unsaved lines in the ~/.bash_history file
• save.sh moves the ~/.bash_history file into the data/ directory with the current timestamp
• analyze.rb parses all of the saved files, lists your most popular commands, and spits out the JSON files containing the results
• top.r and dates.r visually display the JSON files