.bash_history question

iceman47 · 06-06-2003, 05:30 AM

I recently noticed that the history is written to .bash_history after you logout , is this normal in terms of security?
I can imagine that it's handy to stop crackers from erasing their history at the time they're logged in, but it's annying at times if I want to erase my root passwd when I forgot to enter 'su'

. Happens a lot to me at night lol.

iceman47 · 06-06-2003, 10:53 AM

To make my confusion even bigger, ~/.bash_history isn't even listed in the bash manpage.

edit: I see now, sorry.
My bad, should've though further than this

Neomaster · 06-06-2003, 11:15 AM

try this ln -s /dev/null ~ ./bash_history i not to sure if this work on red hat 8.0

iceman47 · 06-06-2003, 11:25 AM

I wasn't looking to turn it off, nor bypass it.
I was just curious if that was some other program's doing as I never noticed that before.
History is actually very usefull imo.

0x4B · 06-06-2003, 04:29 PM

if you look in the builtins section of bash manual (or the bash-builtins manual) there are a few options for history. history -d <offset> delete the history position at offset. you can also force a history file write out (or read)

the history is writen at logout because you could have multiple shells open at the same time and they would confuse a file quite a bit if they all accessed it together. plus, its more efficient.