philh comments on Logging Shell History in Zsh

[philh]

I’ve finally gotten around to setting this up, and I tweaked it a bit more:

function precmd() {
    previous_status=$?

    if [[ -n "$preexec_waiting" ]]; then
        echo -E "$preexec_time $(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S) : $previous_status : $$ : $preexec_pwd : $(history -n -1)" \
            >> ~/.full_history
        preexec_waiting=''
    fi
}

function preexec() {
    # $1, $2 and $3 all have variants of the command to be executed, but none of
    # them is what I want. $1 and $3 can contain newlines. $2 and $3 are
    # alias-expanded. `history -1` in precmd is better.
    preexec_time=$(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S)
    preexec_pwd=$(print -Pn %~)
    preexec_waiting=1
}

Differences from Mike’s version:

• You get both time of start and time of finish for every command (I’d prefer time of start and duration, but oh well)

• You also get exit status

• Correct pwd in case the command is cd or similar, and pwd uses ~ for concision

• The pid makes it easier to separate commands from two different shell instances

• If you type a command with a newline, it gets saved as \n instead of getting split over multiple lines in the file

• I think the : separators make it a bit easier to read

• Doesn’t include the number of the history entry (e.g.history -1 for me is 5785 cat ~/.full_history with a space before 5785 and two spaces after, where history -n -1 would be just cat ~/.full_history)

I think I’d rather have this in a sqlite db than a text file, but that would be more effort.

(edit: made slight improvements. https://​​github.com/​​larkery/​​zsh-histdb is probably worth looking into for sqlite history.)