If you work a lot in the terminal you may recognize the input history, aka history
, as a major productivity boost, even if you use the arrow keys to navigate throw it.
We need to understand that the history buffer is not committed until you log out, so everything you see when running the history
command is not yet written to disk.
To avoid the current input history to be saved we should unset the HISTFILE
environment variable.
unset HISTFIL
Removing history completely is not a good practice. A better option would be ignoring or deleting a specific line.
An easy way to avoid saving to the input history is to prepend a blank space before each command. To do this we need to set HISTCONTROL
to ignorespace
.
export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace
Finally, to simply delete specific commands from history execute:
history -d <history-number>
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