I want to see all bash commands that have been run on a Linux server across multiple user accounts. The specific distribution I'm using is CentOS 5.7. Is there a way to globally search .bash_history files on a server or would it be a more home-grown process of locate | cat | grep
? (I shudder just typing that out).

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3 Answers
Use getent
to enumerate the home directories.
getent passwd |
cut -d : -f 6 |
sed 's:$:/.bash_history:' |
xargs -d '\n' grep -s -H -e "$pattern"
If your home directories are in a well-known location, it could be as simple as
grep -e "$pattern" /home/*/.bash_history
Of course, if a user uses a different shell or a different value of HISTFILE
, this won't tell you much. Nor will this tell you about commands that weren't executed through a shell, or about aliases and functions and now-removed external commands that were in some user directory early in the user's $PATH
. If what you want to know is what commands users have run, you need process accounting or some fancier auditing system; see Monitoring activity on my computer., How to check how long a process ran after it finished?.

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find /home -name .bash_history | xargs grep <string>
Alternatively:
grep string $(find /home -name .bash_history)
Note that this covers home directories in default locations. It would be better to parse /etc/passwd
or invoke getent
, and parse the output of that.
for i in $(getent passwd | cut -d: -f6 ); do grep string ${i}/.bash_history; done

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You could do
find /home | grep bash_history | xargs grep "whatever"
But I don't really think that is much better then what you were thinking.

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getent passwd | cut -d : -f 6 | sed "s:$:/.bash_history:" | xargs -d'\n' -I{} sh -c "[ -f {} ] && echo {}" | xargs -d'\n' grep -Hn -e "$pattern"
– BryKKan Oct 04 '17 at 21:03{}
like this is very dangerous. The file name is interpolated directly in the script. If you have a file name (here: a user name) containing, say,$(rm -rf /)
or;rm -rf /;
, the command will be executed. Always pass file names as arguments to shell scripts, never use find or xargs's{}
mechanism. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Oct 04 '17 at 21:13