Hi all,

I am a system administrator in Linux in my company.

Now, after I login to root, I just discovered that Linux will remember what I enter ask for it to do in the history. Whatever I logout and login again the history still in here.

How to del all history before logout?

My Linux is Red Hat 7.2

Thanks

The default file for saving the command history in bash is ~/.bash_history

and not .bash_profile

Don't laugh. Let this be a lesson to people never to be logged in as root and tired at the same time. ;>

Luckily I back things like that up.

Flibble

Why do you hate history?

Your mean is just need del ~/.history_* file then all the command history will del?

Nope. ~/.bash_history

I guess you're comming from Windows/DOS world, and this is your first *NIX encounter.
del, well there is no del command in *NIX you can mimic it by aliasing 'rm -f' command though.
rm -f ~/.*_history
will remove history file for the current user only.

Yup. Although I probably wouldn't put the wildcard in. Lots of programs use hidden files in your home directory, and wiping out everything that ends in _history is a bit too heavy handed to my way of thinking.

Yep, possible.

Yes, thanks all of suggestion

And, yes, I am from Windows move to *NIX base and still a newbie in Linux system administrator la, since my company is just small business in IT :-)

history -c

Tricky, when will you let me take over?

You can write a bash script to do that job every time you turn off the computer too, maybe something like this:

#!/bin/bash
rm /root/.bash_history

*** you might want to also do something like:
touch /root/.bash_history

to make it an empty file after you remove it.

if you write that as a text file, then make it executable, you can add it to your boot scripts so that it will be run on startup/shutdown

good luck

Another way, if you don't mind having *no* history as root whatsoever, is a var called HISTSIZE, export from /etc/profile:
if [ "$UID" = "0" ]; then export HISTSIZE="0"; fi, or just link the trashcan: if [ "$UID" = "0" ]; then ln -sf /dev/null /root/.bash_history; fi or use your /root/.bash_logout to rm -f /root/.bash_history

Mind you, if you're hiding stuff and have people in the wheel group you'd better use secure wipe because if one has privileges to dd the partition chances are they can retrieve at least parts of any file deleted as well.

how about using "shred"... will that keep people away from his stuff?

(just curious)

Yeah, if you use secure delete apps, overwrite with data, mind the exeptions and don't have fragments of the file on swap etc etc, yeah I guess you can be sure ppl will have a very hard time reconstructing it. Tho if you start shredding files *now* there's still a chance there are fragments around from older "versions" of the file which could be retrievable with, say, TCT.