Secret commands - hide or delete

[sunrat]

Here's something I didn't know. You can delete single commands from bash history or not log them in the first place.

 

Say you have a command you want to delete from history:

1145  su
1146  rsnapshot -t hourly
1147  rsnapshot hourly
1148  kill-infidels
1149  history

Use the -d option to delete:

history -d 1148

It's gone:

1145  su
1146  rsnapshot -t hourly
1147  rsnapshot hourly
1148  history
1149  history -d 1148
1150  history

 

Precede a command with a space and it won't appear in history at all. You need this in .bashrc for this to work but it's probably there by default:

# don't put duplicate lines or lines starting with space in the history.
# See bash(1) for more options
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth

[securitybreach]

Yeah, you can do the same with any history. Bash or Zsh etc. I have never needed to remove a single entry though.