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execute your commands and avoid history records

Terminal - execute your commands and avoid history records
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.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 8 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
<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 | Comments (12) | 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

Interesting, but a space before a command is a better way of running something and not saving it in the history.

Keep in mind though that passwords on the command line may still show up in a process list and if you're on another sysadmin's system, they might have turned on exec logging to keep track of what users are running.

Comment by deltaray 143 weeks and 4 days ago

Putting a password in to a variable in the environment of a shell is an *incredibly* bad idea. First, the value will stay in memory until it is changed. Secondly, shell expansion will have it one the command line -- leaving it in another shell environment variable, and third (as pointed out above) it can end up in the process list on the system.

And, even if the memory is freed up by the shell, and the variable is reset, the value of the password is still in memory...you have no way of controlling when the memory page will be reused and therefore no way to avoid someone dumping pages of memory from the system looking for items that could be passwords.

Comment by unixmonkey11428 143 weeks and 3 days ago

This hack is truth. The space command thing is crap. Another way to not right your entire session history (If auto-append to history is not on) is to run kill -9 $$. The $$ is your user session pid.

Comment by somaddict 26 weeks and 2 days ago

Your point of view

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