I love the punchcard graph on GitHub, showing the hourly/daily/weekly output of a project in a nice and neat format. I decided to apply the punchcard format to my Bash history, one of the random bits of data I have lying around.

By default, Bash just stores history commands sequentially with a number and the command. To store the command with a timestamp, you must set the HISTTIMEFORMAT variable in your bashrc. That variable is used to format the output from “history”, but it must be set to something for Bash to store the timestamp.

export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S - '

With a timestamped .bash_history file, you can figure out when you were using your terminal! Someone else had already come up with this idea using git history data, so I borrowed most of their code and created a new project on github.

github.com/askedrelic/Bash-History-Punchcard

Sample output from my account on this server (thebehrensventure.com)

Sample output from my main machine (jofur)

So for both of these, my bash history goes back about 7 months, when I turned on the variable. It’s not 100% accurate either because I have duplicates being ignored and some other settings altering my bash history. It looks like Tue/Wed/Thur are my big days for getting stuff done!