When you are using the history command on a UNIX system, by default, you’re only getting an action list with numbers but no date and/or time to complete this history. For that, you have to define an environment variable HISTTIMEFORMAT that will describe how you want to display the timestamp for each command.
To display the timestamp temporarily (during session), you can just export the variable before sending the command:
$export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T " ; history
You will get:
2021 01/04/17 11:54:04 systemctl list-units 2022 01/04/17 11:54:10 systemctl list-unit-files 2023 01/04/17 11:54:15 cd /etc/ 2024 01/04/17 11:54:33 ls -lsta 2025 01/04/17 11:54:33 ps auxw | grep apache 2026 01/04/17 11:54:35 date 2027 01/04/17 11:54:35 cd .. 2028 01/04/17 11:54:37 cd /var/log 2029 01/04/17 11:54:37 ls -lsta 2030 01/04/17 11:54:40 cat messages 2031 01/04/17 15:48:44 history 2032 01/04/17 15:48:51 export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T " ; history
If you want to keep that display for a future session, you have to add this variable to your bash profile and reload your profile:
$echo 'export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T "' >> ~/.bash_profile $source ~/.bash_profile