How to Stop Commands from Appearing in Bash History

I usually don't want my secrets to show up in my bash history in the $HOME/.bash_history file. Long ago, folks told me that using a trailing space will solve this issue, but it didn't. Apparently, there's some extra stuff to do

Just do

HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6475524/how-do-i-prevent-commands-from-showing-up-in-bash-history#29188490

The above also helps with getting rid of duplicate commands from the bash history, which is pretty cool ๐Ÿ†’๐Ÿ˜Ž๐Ÿ‘Œ since I use fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf to search through my history and choose commands, and when I search through a command with some strings, sometimes same result shows up multiple times - so many times that it's crazy and I just wish it just showed one unique result and get rid of duplicates, now this is possible because fzf looks at my $HOME/.bash_history only to look at all my past commands and if the bash history file contains unique commands, all is good, right? ;) By the way, I use fzf as part of my Ctrl + r keybinding for reverse search over all commands.

fzf has so many ideas for keybindings themselves - https://github.com/junegunn/fzf?tab=readme-ov-file#key-bindings-for-command-line , apart from community's ideas ๐Ÿ’ก๐Ÿ˜„

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Karuppiah Natarajan
Karuppiah Natarajan

I like learning new stuff - anything, including technology. I love tinkering with new tools, systems and services, especially open source projects