Execute command without keeping it in history

Question

I want to execute some commands but don t want to store them in the command history  So that nobody will be able to search it in the  bash history file   Is there any way how to execute bash commands this way

User · Answer

An extension of  John Doe  amp   user3270492 s answer  But  this seems to work for me    lt your secret command gt   history -d    HISTCMD-1     You should not see the entry of the command in your history   Here s the explanation    The  history -d  deletes the mentioned entry from the history   The HISTCMD stores the command number of the one to be executed next  So   HISTCMD-1  refers to the last executed command   Remove a certain line from Bash history file

User · Answer

You might consider using a shell without history  like perhaps   bin sh  lt  lt  END    your commands without history END    perhaps  bin dash or  bin sash could be more appropriate than  bin sh   or even better use the batch utility e g  batch  lt  lt  EOB    your commands EOB   The history would then contain sh or batch which is not very meaningful

User · Answer

You can also use the following command   echo toto  history -d   history   sed -n   s  s    0-9     s      1 p     I think it s a very portable command

User · Answer

There are several ways you can achieve this  This sets the size of the history file to 0   export HISTFILESIZE 0   This sets the history file to  dev null  effectively disabling it   export HISTFILE  dev null   For individual commands  you can prefix the command with a space and it won t be saved in the history file  Note that this requires you have the ignorespace value included in the  HISTCONTROL environment variable  man bash and search for ignorespace for more details

User · Answer

In any given Bash session  set the history file to  dev null by typing   export HISTFILE  dev null   Note that  as pointed out in the comments  this will not write any commands in that session to the history   Just don t mess with your system administrator s hard work  please     Doodad s solution is more elegant  Simply unset the variable  unset HISTFILE  thanks

User · Answer

If you are using zsh you can run   setopt histignorespace   After this is set  each command starting with a space will be excluded from history   You can use aliases in  zshrc to turn this on off     Toggle ignore-space  Useful when entering passwords  alias history-ignore-space-on    setopt hist ignore space   echo  Commands starting with space are now EXCLUDED from history     alias history-ignore-space-off    unsetopt hist ignore space   echo  Commands starting with space are now ADDED to history

User · Answer

As mentioned by Doodad in comments  unset HISTFILE does this nicely  but in case you also want to also delete some history  do echo  HISTFILE to get the history file location  usually    bash history   unset HISTFILE  and edit    bash history  or whatever HISTFILE was - of course it s now unset so you can t read it      echo  HISTFILE         E g     bash history   unset HISTFILE   vi    bash history     Or your preferred editor   Then you ve edited your history  and the fact that you edited it

User · Answer

You can start your session with  export HISTFILE  dev null  history -d   history 1    then proceed with your sneaky doings  Setting the histfile to  dev null will be logged to the history file  yet this entry will be readily deleted and no traces  at least in the history file  will be shown   Also  this is non-permanent

User · Answer

This is handy if you want to erase all the history  including the fact that you erased all the history   rm  bash history export HISTFILE  dev null exit

User · Answer

Start your command with a space and it won t be included in the history   Be aware that this does require the environment variable  HISTCONTROL to be set    Check that the following command returns ignorespace or ignoreboth    gt  echo  HISTCONTROL  To add the environment variable if missing  the following line can be added to the bash profile  E g   HOME  bashrc  export HISTCONTROL ignorespace    After sourcing the profile again space prefixed commands will not be written to  HISTFILE

User · Answer

You just need to run    set  o history  To see more  run    man set

User · Answer

echo  discreet  history -d   history 1

User · Answer

This command might come in handy  This will not record the command that is executed  history -d    HISTCMD-1    amp  amp   lt Your Command Here gt

[linux] Execute command without keeping it in history

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