Tag Archives: profile

How to log bash history with syslog

There are two methods to get this thing done.

1. Trap method - drop the following snippet into either the per-user or system-wide bash profile (~/.bash_profile or /etc/profile, respectively)

unset HISTSIZE HISTFILESIZE
export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T'
function log2syslog
{
   declare COMMAND
   COMMAND=$(fc -ln -0)
   logger -p local1.notice -t bash -i -- "${USER}:${COMMAND}"
}
trap log2syslog DEBUG

2. Prompt Method - this method logs by hacking the prompt command to call history and write to syslog.

PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a >(tee -a ~/.bash_history | logger -t "$USER[$$] $SSH_CONNECTION")'

Fixing the annoying "perl: warning: Setting locale failed" error message

 This is what I get:

[codesyntax lang="bash"]

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_US.utf8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

[/codesyntax]

 This is how I fix it:

[codesyntax lang="bash"]

export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
apt-get install locales
dpkg-reconfigure locales

[/codesyntax]

The export lines above can also be saved into either ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc.