Why does bash have a HISTCONTROL=ignorespace option?

Question

Or to phrase it differently, why would you want to prevent commands from being written to the bash history?

This is a thread on bash's mailing list related to your question: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2010-02/msg00024.html — Jorge V., Mar 10 '16 at 00:23

Anthon · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-03T03:35:13.843

20

The one thing I use that the initial space for is if I want to be able to restart an older commandline that starts with the same command (!ls e.g.) and I need to be able to re-execute the older one, but not the newer.

The other time I use it is in the (seldom) cases I give a password on the commandline, I rather not have those stored in the .bash_history file once I exit bash.

edited Oct 03 '14 at 03:35

answered Feb 19 '14 at 16:22

Anthon

79,293

score 5 · Answer 2 · 2014-02-20T07:26:01.673

5

I'd rather not know how many times I've played crawl!

Occasionally I like to do a history | awk '{print $2}' | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -n | tail to see my most-issued commands. I want to see a ranking in there of commands I find interesting (things like ls, svn, p4, for, and cd) and I feel better when I don't see games in that list. So when I run something that I don't want to see in that list, I prefix it with a space.

edited Feb 20 '14 at 07:26

answered Feb 20 '14 at 05:14

1

This doesn't really answer the Q. – slm Feb 20 '14 at 06:42
3

I don't know: it is a valid use of the variable (and it is expressed with a degree of humour and geekiness). Upvoted. – jasonwryan Feb 20 '14 at 07:20
you can add the games you play to HISTIGNORE to avoid getting it in history file – theist Nov 24 '15 at 08:10

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 20 '14 at 05:06

In addition to Anthon: It is not just possible to avoid similar command lines in history but from time to time there is a need to do that: I often analyze OpenPGP certificates in the shell. That means that 15 lines (sometimes more) are thrown in the console. You do that a few times and your history is full. Even worse: History does not work well if the command covers the whole screen (bash). The start of the command is not shown correctly and thus can hardly be edited.

Thus I keep a rather short one of these command lines in the history and block the other ones.

You should make your bash history size (number of items or lines) unlimited export HISTFILESIZE=-1 — Jorge V., Mar 10 '16 at 00:12

Why does bash have a HISTCONTROL=ignorespace option?

3 Answers3

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