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You are here: Home / ESXi / Quick Tip - "poor mans" history command in ESXi

Quick Tip - "poor mans" history command in ESXi

02.19.2015 by William Lam // 1 Comment

When I am logged into the ESXi Shell, I often forget that history command is not implemented in ESXi which can be helpful when recalling the list of operations that had been executed in the past. I especially rely on the history command when I am tinkering around with things and once I am successful with the end result, I can easily go back and see the exact steps I took. Recently, I tried running history command only to be let down again as I forgot it was not implemented 🙁

I was thinking there had to be a way on ESXi and then it hit me! Starting with ESXi 5.1, all operations executed in ESXi Shell and Console were automatically logged to /var/log/shell.log. The information I was looking was there but instead of having to manually view the contents of the log, I could simply create an "alias" to  a history command which could display the last N-number of entries using the tail command.

Here is an example alias to "history" command to view the last 50 lines in /var/log/shell.log:

alias history="tail -50 /var/log/shell.log"

To make the alias permanent and persist across reboots, we just need to add the entry to /etc/profile.local

Now, I can run the history command on ESXi and get exactly what I want.

Screen Shot 2015-02-18 at 9.29.41 PM
Note: Entries in /var/log/shell.log contain more operations executed by all users. You can further refine the aliased command to search only for the current user, such as the root account.

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Categories // ESXi Tags // alias, cli, ESXi, history, shell

Comments

  1. Akram says

    02/20/2015 at 7:56 pm

    Really useful. Was looking for this !!

    Reply

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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