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Better Recording of Shell Commands
  contributed by Scott, sharrison@users.sourceforge.net
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GOAL: Keep track of the time of shell command execution
and do not lose command history.

RATIONALE: Delivering educational resources to students via
educational software is serious business.
I recommend this technical tip as a practical way to
improve your ability to capture most of the
shell commands that would be typically executed on
your LON-CAPA server system.  Someday, you may need
to reconstruct the events and happenings on your Linux
operating system over a large historical period.

THE SOLUTION:
The following solution works well for me
on many of my servers.

1. cp /etc/profile /etc/profile.orig
2. Edit /etc/profile
3. diff /etc/profile /etc/profile.orig
[root@zaphod root]# diff /etc/profile /etc/profile.orig 
32,36c32
< HISTSIZE=1000000000
< HISTFILESIZE=1000000000
< HISTDATE=`date`
< 
< echo "Commands below this line occur after $HISTDATE" >> $HOME/.bash_history
---
> HISTSIZE=1000
42c38
< export PATH USER LOGNAME MAIL HOSTNAME HISTSIZE HISTFILESIZE INPUTRC
---
> export PATH USER LOGNAME MAIL HOSTNAME HISTSIZE INPUTRC

NOTE: /etc/profile is many times called twice, so there are two
lines "Commands below this line"... entered into .bash_history.

This is the best solution I have found aside from altering
the bash source code and recompiling bash.