Getting time stamps for bash history

In order to get a time-stamped command line history for bash, look up the HISTTIMEFORMAT setting in the man pages for bash. My HISTTIMEFORMAT is currently set to %F %T, to understand which you have to look at the arguments to strftime(3). %F means YYYY-MM-DD and %T means hh:mm:ss. These time stamps are stored in a weird fashion, possibly seconds from epoch or something, so you cannot understand them by just looking at the .bash_history file. Instead, use the history command. Here, the timestamps are formatted as requested. To find out more, do a help history (not man! - this is a bash thing).