Question

I want to schedule a program that display history of a remote machine and stores it in a file in the local machine with timestamps(i.e which commands were executed when)
The code i used is this:

ssh -i private_key user@ip 'export HISTTIMEFORMAT=\"%D-%T \" ; \
                            export HISTFILE=/home/$user/.bash_history; \
                            set -o history; history' > myfile.txt

But instead of giving the correct time stamps it puts the present time in front of every command. So if the scheduler runs at say 9 o clock the time stamp for every command is 9 o clock.
Where am I going wrong?

Answer 1

If BASHTIMEFORMAT isn’t set in a session, the timing information is not saved to the history file (otherwise it is saved as a comment in there).

So unless the user you’re trying to log has that in his/her environment, you will not get timing information. It is simply not recorded, so impossible to retrieve.