Bash Command History – Why Not Set ‘histappend’ in Bash?

I don't think any shell does anything beyond whitespace munging when storing commands into the history. What * expanded to is not recorded, and there doesn't seem to be an option to record it.

Note that it would not be possible to record in full generality anyway. For example, if you run a='foo* bar*'; rm $a (rm $=~a in zsh), the shell is unlikely to detect the wildcard match syntactically. And there's no option to log all glob expansions.

You could cobble something together with preexec (or the bash equivalent). Untested first go (for zsh):

history_wildcards=()
precmd () {
  emulate -LR zsh
  local n tmp
  history -1 | read n tmp
  history_wildcards[$(($n+1))]=$=~1
}

This fills the history_wildcards array to a string with the glob expansion of each word in the command line. Word splitting is performed in the naive way, so something like echo ' /**/* ' will expand /**/* (i.e. traverse your disk). Don't expect anything useful from cd subdir && echo * or anything so mind-bogglingly nontrivial.

If you plan beforehand, you can make zsh expand the wildcards before you submit the command. In the default configuration, just press Tab when your cursor is on the glob. If you've configured completion differently, try ^X * (expand-word).

This was a hack I used once on a shared account to track who did what:

PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a; sed -i '\$s/\$/ \#$NAME/' $HISTFILE; history -r; $PROMPT_COMMAND"

It writes the history before the PROMPT is displayed: in effect, after each command. You could modify this to use save the exit code in the history:

PROMPT_COMMAND="CODE=$?; history -a; sed -i '\$s/\$/ \#\$CODE/' $HISTFILE; history -r; $PROMPT_COMMAND"

This would leave entries in your history like:

$ history 2
 1271  vim .bashrc #0
 1272  history 2

(The last entry will be updated, after the history command exits, so the exit code isn't visible in this output.)

This has the annoying effect that history in your prompt will have the comment:

$ # press up
$ history 2 #0

The comment doesn't affect execution or output usually, but makes editing a pain.

Now you can grep your history to see which codes exited successfully:

history | grep '#0$'
# or grep '#[^0]*$' for unsuccessful commands.