HISTTIMEFORMAT messed up adb

Question

I set up earlier this month HISTTIMEFORMAT cause I needed to see the time on some of the commands I previously used. However, I most likely messed something up with those commands, because every time I try to use adb for anything (adb kill-server eg.) I get the following error: bash: /home/user/Android/Sdk/platform-tools/adbHISTTIMEFORMAT=%d%m%y: No such file or directory. These are the commands that I used to setup HISTTIMEFORMAT:

 1032  20/05/22 19:17:45 echo 'HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d%m%y %T "' >> ~/.bashrc
 1033  20/05/22 19:17:46 history
 1034  20/05/22 19:19:17 source ~/.bashrc
 1035  20/05/22 19:19:19 history
 1036  20/05/22 19:20:22 echo 'HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T "' >> ~/.bashrc
 1037  20/05/22 19:20:32 source ~/.bashrc

What exactly did I do wrong and how can I fix/revert it?

Answer 1

Hypothesis: your old ~/.bashrc contained an incomplete line and the line was related to adb. Your command

echo 'HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d%m%y %T "' >> ~/.bashrc

added to the line instead of adding another line. This behavior is one of the reasons the last line should be properly terminated.

My tests indicate an incomplete line in ~/.bashrc is not ignored by Bash. You may have had an incomplete alias … line that worked. Your incomplete line might be:

alias adb='/home/user/Android/Sdk/platform-tools/adb'

(maybe without the single-quotes) and after the first echo … >> ~/.bashrc it became:

alias adb='/home/user/Android/Sdk/platform-tools/adb'HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d%m%y %T "

(maybe without the single-quotes). The line neither defines the exact alias you wanted, nor affects HISTTIMEFORMAT. It's a complete line though, so your second echo … >> ~/.bashrc worked as intended and created a separate line that actually affects HISTTIMEFORMAT.

In a comment you wrote:

I tried removing that line from the bashrc file, but it just removed the timestamp from the history command. The adb error is still there.

Removing the last line (i.e. the output of the second echo) without noticing that the previous line is contaminated (with the output of the first echo) would do exactly this. My hypothesis stands.

Check the last line of your ~/.bashrc.