I’m not great at remembering what I did so I can include it on my time logger. I found I could trawl through my zsh history file to get an idea of what I’d been up to and use it as a memory jogger to go back in time and update my timesheet.
By using a mixture of sed and awk I was able to grab the columns from the ~/.zsh_history file. I can import this into a spreadsheet and then use a formula to convert the epoch date format to a proper date/time I can read.
The first part of the process I need to deal with the multiline history commands I’ve used. These end with a \\ and new line and need to be made into a single line to be processed by awk.
sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\\\n/\\/g' ~/.zsh_historyIf that looks like gibberish to you, it means scan the ~/.zsh_history and replace \+newline with \. Lots of escape sequences, newline and a regex make for hard reading.
Next I need to pipe it through awk because I need to make it into fixed width data and only output the columns I need.
| awk 'BEGIN { FIELDWIDTHS = "2 10 3 999" } {gsub(/"/, "\"\"", $4)} { printf "%s,,\"%s\"\n",$2,$4 }'This sets the column widths at 2, 10, 3 and 999. and as it processes each line gsub replaces quotes with two quotes. We only want the date and the command and they are in columns 2 and 4 ($2 $4), which we use printf to format them so the commands are surrounded by quotes and a newline at the end.
Put it all together:
sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\\\n/\\/g' ~/.zsh_history | awk 'BEGIN { FIELDWIDTHS = "2 10 3 999" } {gsub(/"/, "\"\"", $4)} { printf "%s,\"%s\"\n",$2,$4 }' > history.csvThen I run it and can open the history.csv file with as a spreadsheet. Tell it that I’m using comma separated and a string delimiter as a double quote and I get a spreadsheet with three columns - the epoch date, and empty column, and the command used.
In the empty column I am going to put in the following formula to convert the epoch date to a real date.time.
=A1/86400+25569I can then format the cell to a date time and choose to display it as Date 31 Dec 99 and now I can use that all down that column for meaningful and filterable date times.