How to delete bash terminal history upto certain no. of commands

sd|| · 01-12-2010, 02:50 PM

i want to delete some say 10 previous commands in bash shell!! what shud i do??

MensaWater · 01-12-2010, 02:55 PM

Why would you be wanting to cover your tracks like that?

bobshaffer2 · 01-12-2010, 02:57 PM

Try editing ~/.bash_history. If that doesn't work, IDK. I think there is a way to get bash to not add it to history at all, but I don't recall exactly how it's done. I stumbled upon it once by accident...

arizonagroovejet · 01-12-2010, 03:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sd||

i want to delete some say 10 previous commands in bash shell!! what shud i do??

'should'.

Bash history is usually stored in ~/.bash_history but it's location can be controlled by setting $HISTFILE
The history file is only written when the shell exits, so you can delete the last ten lines from a history file but that might not be what you want.
You can prevent anything from being written to the history file by setting the value of $HISTSIZE to 0. Or I guess you could set $HISTFILE to /dev/null.

See also http://www.faqs.org/docs/bashman/bashref_106.html