Prompt History
 

Does anyone no how I can clear the history of my command prompt. I usually use the repeat function when programming, but now I have a bunch of other commands in between so it's not as convenient.

Just so I'm not confusing. When at the command prompt, I can push the up arrow to scroll through past entered commands. But there is a history of weeks of mistype and deleted files, can I clear that history?

Thanks in advance.
Ace

Eureka..I think
 

I think I found it.

history -c

Right?

Thanks anyways.
Ace

you can just delete the ~/.bash_history file for a one of shot over logout. you can also set the HISTSIZE option to a lower value in your .bashrc to reduce the number of saved commands, or add "unset HISTFILE" to not save it to disk at all.

Here are two more shell variable options for you to help keep your history sane.

Use "HISTCONTROL=ignoredups" to keep the history from recording multiple instances of the same command, or use "erasedups" instead to keep only the most recent entry.

And using "HISTIGNORE=colon:separated:list:of:commands" will make it ignore any commands that you don't want to see at all.

There are more options you can use. Check out the bash man page.

Edit: here's one more that I use often--history searching. Hitting crtl+r, then typing something will bring up the most recent matching string in your history. Hit it again for the next match, or crtl+s to move forward again. Makes it easy to jump back to previously-used commands.

I never knew that, interesting.

Thanks
 

Thanks for taking the time and the resulting info guys.

Ace

Another "goodie" in this context is how to handle
the ~/.bash_history if you have several terminals
open and use them all intermittently (wanting to
retain the history in one big file):

Cheers,
Tink

I, too, would like to thank the contributors....