How to delete history of last 10 commands in shell

Question

Commands follows     511  clear   512  history   513  history -d 505   514  history   515  history -d 507 510 513   516  history   517  history -d 509   518  history   519  history -d 511   520  history   I can delete single one by history -d 511  but how to delete last 10 commands and in between 10 commands history using single command in shell   Can we write a bash script and execute for deletion of history

User · Answer

I use this  I have bash 4    histrm         local num   1 - 1      builtin history -d   builtin history   sed -rn   s      digit        digit         digit        1 p          num--     amp  amp   FUNCNAME  num     builtin history -w     The builtin history parts as well as the last -w is because I have in place a variation of the famous tricks to share history across terminals and this function would break without those parts  They ensure a call to the real bash history builtin  and not to my own wrapper around it   and to write the history to HISTFILE right after the entries were removed   However this will work as it is with  normal  history configurations   You should call it with the number of last entries you want to remove  for example   histrm 10   Will remove the last 10 entries

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Maybe will be useful for someone  When you login to any user of any console terminal history of your current session exists only in some  buffer  which flushes to    bash history on your logout  So  to keep things secret you can just  history -r  amp  amp  exit and you will be logged out with all your session s  and only  history cleared

User · Answer

history -d 511 history -d 511 history -d 511 history -d 511 history -d 511 history -d 511 history -d 511 history -d 511 history -d 511 history -d 511    Brute but functional

User · Answer

My answer is based on previous answers  but with the addition of reversing the sequence so that history items are deleted from most recent to least recent   Get your current history  adjust the number of lines you want to see    history   tail -n 10   This gives me something like  1003  25-04-2016 17 54 52 echo  Command 1  1004  25-04-2016 17 54 54 echo  Command 2  1005  25-04-2016 17 54 57 echo  Command 3  1006  25-04-2016 17 54 59 echo  Command 4  1007  25-04-2016 17 55 01 echo  Command 5  1008  25-04-2016 17 55 03 echo  Command 6  1009  25-04-2016 17 55 07 echo  Command 7  1010  25-04-2016 17 55 09 echo  Command 8  1011  25-04-2016 17 55 11 echo  Command 9  1012  25-04-2016 17 55 14 echo  Command 10    Select the start and end positions for the items you want to delete   I m going to delete entries 1006 to 1008   for h in   seq 1006 1008   do history -d 1006  done   This will generate history -d commands for 1006  then 1007 becomes 1006 and 1006 is deleted  then 1008  became 1007  is now 1006 and gets deleted   If I also wanted to delete the history delete command then it s a bit more complicated because you need to know the current max history entry   You can get this with  there may be a better way     history 1   awk   print  1     Putting it together you can use this to delete a range  and also delete the history delete command   for h in   seq 1006 1008   do history -d 1006  done  history -d   history 1   awk   print  1      Wrap this all up in a function to add to your    bashrc   histdel      for h in   seq  1  2   do     history -d  1   done   history -d   history 1   awk   print  1          Example deleting command 4  5 and 6  1049-1051  and hiding the evidence    18 21 02 jonathag gb-slo-svb-0221     history 11  1046  25-04-2016 18 20 47 echo  Command 1   1047  25-04-2016 18 20 48 echo  Command 2   1048  25-04-2016 18 20 50 echo  Command 3   1049  25-04-2016 18 20 51 echo  Command 4   1050  25-04-2016 18 20 53 echo  Command 5   1051  25-04-2016 18 20 54 echo  Command 6   1052  25-04-2016 18 20 56 echo  Command 7   1053  25-04-2016 18 20 57 echo  Command 8   1054  25-04-2016 18 21 00 echo  Command 9   1055  25-04-2016 18 21 02 echo  Command 10   1056  25-04-2016 18 21 07 history 11  18 21 07 jonathag gb-slo-svb-0221     histdel 1049 1051  18 21 23 jonathag gb-slo-svb-0221     history 8  1046  25-04-2016 18 20 47 echo  Command 1   1047  25-04-2016 18 20 48 echo  Command 2   1048  25-04-2016 18 20 50 echo  Command 3   1049  25-04-2016 18 20 56 echo  Command 7   1050  25-04-2016 18 20 57 echo  Command 8   1051  25-04-2016 18 21 00 echo  Command 9   1052  25-04-2016 18 21 02 echo  Command 10   1053  25-04-2016 18 21 07 history 11   The question was actually to delete the last 10 commands from history  so if you want to save a little effort you could use another function to call the histdel function which does the calculations for you   histdeln         Get the current history number   n   history 1   awk   print  1         Call histdel with the appropriate range   histdel      n -  1         n - 1          This function takes 1 argument  the number of previous history items to delete   So to delete the last 10 commands from history just use histdeln 10

User · Answer

Try the following   for i in  511  520   do history -d  i  echo  history -d  i   done

User · Answer

edit  Changed the braced iterators  good call  Also  call this function with a reverse iterator  You can probably do something like this     bin bash HISTFILE    bash history     if you are running it in a                               non interactive shell history would not work else set -o history for i in  seq  1  2   do     history -d  i done history -w  Where you will evoke like this    nameOfYourScript 563 514  Notice I haven t put any error checking in for the bounds  I ll leave that as an exercise to the reader  see also this question

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Combining answers from above   history -w vi    bash history history -r

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I used a combination of solutions shared in this thread to erase the trace in commands history  First  I verified where is saved commands history with   echo  HISTFILE   I edited the history with   vi  lt pathToFile gt    After that  I flush current session history buffer with   history -r  amp  amp  exit   Next time you enter to this session  the last command that you will see on command history is the last that you left on pathToFile

User · Answer

First  type  history and write down the sequence of line numbers you want to remove   To clear lines from let s say line 1800 to 1815 write the following in terminal     for line in   seq 1800 1815    do history -d 1800  done   If you want to delete the history for the deletion command  add  1 for 1815   1816 and history for that sequence   the deletion command will be deleted   For example       for line in   seq 1800 1816    do history -d 1800  done

User · Answer

I use this script to delete last 10 commands in history   pos  HISTCMD  start      pos-11     end      pos-1     for i in   eval echo     start     end      do history -d  start  done   It uses  HISTCMD environment var to get the history index and uses that to delete last 10 entries in history

User · Answer

A simple function can kill all by number  though it barfs on errors   kill hist         for i in   echo      sed -e  s    n g     sort -rn   sed -e  s  n           do             history -d  i      done   kill hist  seq 511 520    or kill a few ranges kill hist  seq 1001 1010   seq 1200 1201

User · Answer

Not directly the requested answer  but maybe the root-cause of the question  You can also prevent commands from even getting into the history  by prefixing them with a space character    This command will be in the history echo Hello world    This will not  echo Hello world

User · Answer

Have you tried editing the history file directly      bash history

User · Answer

for h in   seq   history   tail -1   awk   print  1-N       history   tail -1   awk   print  1      tac   do history -d  h  done  history -d   history   tail -1   awk   print  1      If you want to delete 10 lines then just change the value of N to 10

User · Answer

to delete last 10 entries  based on your example     history -d 511 520

User · Answer

history -c will clear all histories

User · Answer

for x in  seq  1  2  do   history -d  1 done

User · Answer

With Bash 5 you can now do a range   Hooray    history -d 511-520   or counting backwards 10   history -d -10--1   Excerpt from Bash 5 Man Page       history       Options  if supplied  have the following meanings        -d OFFSET        Delete the history entry at position OFFSET   If OFFSET is       positive  it should be specified as it appears when the       history is displayed   If OFFSET is negative  it is       interpreted as relative to one greater than the last history       position  so negative indices count back from the end of the       history  and an index of  -1  refers to the current  history       -d  command        -d START-END        Delete the history entries between positions START and END        inclusive   Positive and negative values for START and END are       interpreted as described above    Here is my solution for Bash 4  It iteratively deletes a single entry or a  range of history starting with lowest index   delHistory          count       2 - 1  -  1        while     count -ge 0     do         history -d   1            count--       done    delHistory 511 520

User · Answer

Short but sweet  for i in  1  10   do history -d     HISTCMD-11    done

[linux] How to delete history of last 10 commands in shell?

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