view history of opened programs Manjaro Linux

Question

Is there a way to view a log, or history of all programs opened in Manjaro Linux?

Only if you started them from the terminal and haven't truncated your shell history... — jasonwryan, Feb 17 '13 at 18:14

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-17T19:34:15.447

2

Install the acct package (GNU accounting utilities, which implements BSD process accounting). You'll get a log of all executed commands (not just interactive applications) which you can list with the lastcomm command.

edited Jul 17 '16 at 19:34

answered Feb 17 '13 at 18:20

Links broken.. I tested acct package and it doesn't seem as detailed as one would want.. example of missing info: Process ID which initiated the command, the file path of the process, its parent ID (if has any) etc. Problem is - if I want to query /proc with a process ID, then the process wouldn't necessarily be there... he could be gone until I try to query for it with more information. – Dor Jul 17 '16 at 13:35
@Dor If you want more logging, you have to request it explicitly. The right tool on Linux would be the audit subsystem, see for example this answer. Unix systems run a lot of short-lived process, so if you log it all, you end up with a lot of information that isn't very useful (who cares what process ran grep?). – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jul 17 '16 at 19:36
That is often true. But I'd expect it to be possible with an exclusions list (to exclude common binaries like grep etc.). Thank you! – Dor Jul 19 '16 at 07:53

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