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Execute a command without saving it in the history

Terminal - Execute a command without saving it in the history
<space>command
2009-03-17 16:25:29
User: eaZy
304
Up
Down
Execute a command without saving it in the history

Prepending one or more spaces to your command won't be saved in history.

Useful for pr0n or passwords on the commandline.

Tested on BASH.

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 9 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
cat | bash
2010-08-18 13:47:46
User: glaudiston
Functions: cat
2
Up
Down
execute your commands and avoid history records

Sometimes you don't want to leave history, because of passwords use or somethink like.

I think it help.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
read -e -s -p "Password: " password
2010-08-18 17:53:27
User: freiheit
Functions: read
2
Up
Down
execute your commands hiding secret bits from history records
wget --user=username --password="$password" http://example.org/

Instead of hiding commands entirely from history, I prefer to use "read" to put the password into a variable, and then use that variable in the commands instead of the password. Without the "-e" and "-s" it should work in any bourne-type shell, but the -s is what makes sure the password doesn't get echoed to the screen at all. (-e makes editing work a bit better)

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
<space> secret -p password
2011-09-16 12:41:16
User: pcholt
Tags: Security history
1
Up
Down
Enter a command but keep it out of the history

Put a space in front of your command on the command line and it will not be logged as part of your command line history.

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
HISTFILE= ; your_secret_command
2012-01-26 21:08:57
User: titan2x
1
Up
Down
Execute a command without saving it in the history

Yes, by correctly setting the HIST* variables you can make certain commands not saved in history. But that's complicated and easy to make a mistake. If you set HISTFILE= to blank, nothing in your current shell session will be saved in history. Although this is not a precise answer to the subject, but it's very simple.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

depends on the variable HISTCONTROL

(must be ignoreboth to work)

Comment by albanichou 217 weeks and 5 days ago

You use the command line for pr0n?! lolz

Comment by zombiedeity 217 weeks and 5 days ago

hmmm... 45(1 pr0n?

Comment by IMissDos 217 weeks and 5 days ago

From man bash:

HISTCONTROL

A colon-separated list of values controlling how commands are saved on the history list. If the list of values includes ignorespace, lines which begin with a space character are not saved in the history list. A value of ignoredups causes lines matching the previous history entry to not be saved. A value of ignoreboth is shorthand for ignorespace and ignoredups.

A value of erasedups causes all previous lines matching the current line to be removed from the history list before that line is saved. Any value not in the above list is ignored. If HISTCONTROL is unset, or does not include a valid value, all lines read by the shell parser are saved on the history list, subject to the value of HISTIGNORE. The second and subsequent lines of a multi-line compound command are not tested, and are added to the history regardless of the value of HISTCONTROL.

Comment by Malkavian 217 weeks and 5 days ago

I wouldn't rely on this 'feature' ;) -- see other comments about HISTCONTROL in addition to reading the manual for bash!

Comment by alexandersafir 217 weeks and 5 days ago

In zsh you can do "fc -p" to switch to a new history (and make $HISTFILE empty) and "fc -P" to switch back to the last one.

Comment by cran 217 weeks and 4 days ago

you have to put:

export HISTIGNORE="[ \t]*"

in ~/.bashrc for this to work. if you don't have .bashrc in in ~/ just make your own

Comment by genofunk 217 weeks and 4 days ago

this looks like a bug in bash...if you don't alter HISTCONTROL of course.

Comment by wwoollff 215 weeks and 4 days ago

Use kill to exit the shell instead of exit or logout:

kill -9 $$
Comment by vutcovici 215 weeks and 2 days ago

ironically export HISTIGNORE="[ \t]*" or

echo export HISTIGNORE="[ \t]*" >> .bashrc

will appear in the history :)

You should do

<space> history -d N

Where N is the postion export HISTIGNORE="[ \t]*"

Comment by funyotros 184 weeks and 5 days ago

an easier way to do this in zsh is to add "setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE" to your .zshrc

it'll then behave like this command should, but keep the space'd command in history till you enter another one

(from man zshoptions)

Comment by awh 52 weeks and 4 days ago

export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace worked for me. Testet on Centos 5

Comment by wahallah 23 weeks and 6 days ago

Your point of view

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