Is there any way to exclude commands like rm -rf, svn revert from being getting stored in bash history? Actually I, by mistake, have issued them a number of times even though I have no intent to do, just because I am doing things quickly and it happened. Hence results in lost of lots of work I have did so far.
Answers:
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Method 1
You might want $HISTIGNORE: “A colon-separated list of patterns used to decide which command lines should be saved on the history list.” This line in your ~/.bashrc should do the job:
HISTIGNORE='rm *:svn revert*'
Also, you can add a space at the beginning of a command to exclude it from history. This works as long as $HISTCONTROL contains ignorespace or ignoreboth, which is default on any distro I’ve used.
Method 2
Though going slightly different from OP’s question, when I intentionally don’t want a command to get stored in bash history, I prefix them with a space. Works in Ubuntu and its variants, not sure if it works on all systems.
Method 3
I usually kill my bash-instance when I have done things that I don’t want in the history.
kill -9 $$
$$ represents the current process – bash when you run it from the shell. You can use $BASHPID, but that’s more typing 🙂
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