command history of a particular user in a multiuser environment

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Is it possible to find out the history of recently typed in commands of a particular user in a multi user system?

the history command expects a numeric argument with it. is it possible to find out the history o commands of a particular user say John_smith for example?

2

yes, It can be possible, grep the files with the "username" from the .history directory.

eg :

cd ~
cd .history
ls -ltr | grep <username> (John_smith's username)
3 
# ./justdoit test
test USER ".sh_history" HISTORY FILE(s)
=========================================
     1  /bin/bash
     2  bash
     3  exit
     4  ls -l bash
     5  ls -l /bin/bash
     6  exit
     7  bash
     8  exit
     9  bash
    10  exit


#!/bin/bash
## justdoit simple users history view script unix.com @ygemici
user=$1
for i in `find "/home/$user" -name "*history" 2>/dev/null`
do
 echo $i|sed 's|.*/\(.*\)/.*$|\1 USER "'$(echo "${i##/*/}")'" HISTORY FILE(s)|'
 echo "=========================================";sleep 1
 strings -a $i|cat -n|more -d;echo;sleep 2
done