How do I prevent commands from showing up in Bash history?

by

If you’ve set the HISTCONTROL environment variable to ignoreboth (which is usually set by default), commands with a leading space character will not be stored in the history (as well as duplicates).

For example:

$ HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
$ echo test1
$  echo test2
$ history | tail -n2
 1015  echo test1
 1016  history | tail -n2

Here is what man bash says:

HISTCONTROL

A colon-separated list of values controlling how commands are saved on the history list. If the list of values includes ignorespace, lines which begin with a space character are not saved in the history list. A value of ignoredups causes lines matching the previous history entry to not be saved. A value of ignoreboth is shorthand for ignorespace and ignoredups. A value of erasedups causes all previous lines matching the current line to be removed from the history list before that line is saved. Any value not in the above list is ignored. If HISTCONTROL is unset, or does not include a valid value, all lines read by the shell parser are saved on the history list, subject to the value of HISTIGNORE. The second and subsequent lines of a multi-line compound command are not tested, and are added to the history regardless of the value of HISTCONTROL.

See also:

More Related Contents:

  1. Some troubles with using sed and awk [closed]
  2. Why would a correct shell script give a wrapped/truncated/corrupted error message? [duplicate]
  3. Delete all but the most recent X files in bash
  4. Add a new element to an array without specifying the index in Bash
  5. Batch equivalent of Bash backticks
  6. How to find the difference in days between two dates?
  7. Lookup shell variables by name, indirectly [duplicate]
  8. How to assign a heredoc value to a variable in Bash?
  9. Running script upon login in mac OS X [closed]
  10. Command substitution: backticks or dollar sign / paren enclosed? [duplicate]
  11. How do I use su to execute the rest of the bash script as that user?
  12. How to iterate over associative arrays in Bash
  13. How to process each output line in a loop?
  14. How to extract one column of a csv file
  15. bash: force exec’d process to have unbuffered stdout
  16. Set a parent shell’s variable from a subshell
  17. How to expand PS1?
  18. Matching files with various extensions using for loop [duplicate]
  19. What is the name for `
  20. Reading key/value parameters from a file into a shell script
  21. I can’t seem to use the Bash “-c” option with arguments after the “-c” option string
  22. Using dot or “source” while calling another script – what is the difference?
  23. osascript using bash variable with a space
  24. Execute command containing quotes from shell variable [duplicate]
  25. Syntax for a single-line while loop in Bash
  26. Unit testing Bash scripts
  27. Read n lines at a time using Bash
  28. Reading lines from two files in one while loop
  29. How do I kill a backgrounded/detached ssh session?
  30. Creating tar file and naming by current date

Leave a Comment