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0 pointsbayindirh11mo ago0 comments

Why the timestamps are that important? Honestly asking.

You can always time your commands with "time".

0 comments

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.

xorcist11mo ago

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.

hiAndrewQuinn11mo ago

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.

kccqzy11mo ago

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.

hiAndrewQuinn11mo ago

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.

styluss11mo ago

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

bayindirhOP11mo ago

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

stirfish11mo ago

I personally use a modified zbell (in zsh) to give me a notification when a command finishes after 30 seconds, and send me an email if it takes over 2 minutes.

bayindirhOP11mo ago

I generally use Konsole's "notify when program exits" feature. For longer tasks, I have a small tool which I pipe to, and it sends me push notification with the output (if I prefer).

stirfish11mo ago

I had a tool I'd pipe to, but I'd often only think about it after I'd realize that the command was going to take a while. A push notification sound cool; I used email because I knew how to hack it together with curl.

Here's one zbell implementation, not sure it's the original but it looks like it does the trick: https://gist.github.com/oknowton/8346801

bayindirhOP11mo ago

Thanks for sharing the bell. I'll take a look. If you want to try push notifications, I use https://pushover.net as a service.

I developed the tool myself, and it's at https://git.sr.ht/~bayindirh/nudge if you feel like checking it out.

If you want to host the whole push notification infrastructure, you can look at https://ntfy.sh which also can be integrated with cURL.

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bertmuthalaly11mo ago

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.

xorcist11mo ago

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.

hiAndrewQuinn11mo ago

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.

kccqzy11mo ago

hiAndrewQuinn11mo ago

styluss11mo ago

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

bayindirhOP11mo ago

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

stirfish11mo ago

I personally use a modified zbell (in zsh) to give me a notification when a command finishes after 30 seconds, and send me an email if it takes over 2 minutes.

bayindirhOP11mo ago

I generally use Konsole's "notify when program exits" feature. For longer tasks, I have a small tool which I pipe to, and it sends me push notification with the output (if I prefer).

stirfish11mo ago

Here's one zbell implementation, not sure it's the original but it looks like it does the trick: https://gist.github.com/oknowton/8346801

bayindirhOP11mo ago

Thanks for sharing the bell. I'll take a look. If you want to try push notifications, I use https://pushover.net as a service.

I developed the tool myself, and it's at https://git.sr.ht/~bayindirh/nudge if you feel like checking it out.

If you want to host the whole push notification infrastructure, you can look at https://ntfy.sh which also can be integrated with cURL.

1 more reply

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