How to disable "Program '/bin/bash' crashed" warning when killing the shell?

Question

I'm using Kubuntu 14.04. When I exiting terminal emulator (konsole or yakuake) by doing something like kill -9 $$ it doesn't close, and saying:

Warning: Program '/bin/bash' crashed.

How could I disable this behavior and force terminal emulator to silently close when shell is killed?

In the same system, when prompting kill -9 $$ in xterm, it exits without any crash reported.

I don't remember exactly, in which Linux distributions I saw such "silent" behavior from-the-box, but there are some.

Update: the reason to do so is to exit terminal emulator without saving history to .bash_history.

Why do you want to kill the shell rather than letting it terminate gracefully so it can clean up after itself, eg save its history file? — PM 2Ring, Dec 16 '14 at 07:41
My main case to do so is exactly to avoid saving shell history after some crap accidently pasted into open terminal emulator. — AntonioK, Dec 16 '14 at 07:59
I had a feeling that might be the case. :) Try SIGABRT, that should prevent history from being saved without causing bash to crash. FWIW, I don't get a crash with SIGKILL, but I'm currently using a different terminal (rxvt), although I generally use konsole on Mepis 11. — PM 2Ring, Dec 16 '14 at 08:10
kill -SIGABRT $$ returns the same error =(
I guess the problem is in terminal emulator, not in shell itself. — AntonioK, Dec 29 '14 at 11:10
I've just been playing with this stuff in konsole, so I see what you mean. But there's some useful info in How do I close a terminal without saving the history? — PM 2Ring, Dec 29 '14 at 11:36
As your goal is to avoid history entries, try history -d. As this is a bash built-in, details are in help history. — Thomas Erker, Sep 11 '15 at 10:37

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 14 '15 at 17:22

8

Please consider editing /etc/profile. At the bottom add:

unset HISTFILE && exit

for your current session. If wanting all history gone, try:

rm -f $HISTFILE && unset HISTFILE && exit

Killing an app is not the most graceful approach. See Quit Bash Shell Without Saving Bash History (5 Methods). Avoid #2, as this is what you are trying now.

answered Sep 14 '15 at 17:22

eyoung100

Thank you, that's solving my issue. So I could now make an alias for bash, something like alias french_exit='unset HISTFILE && exit' – AntonioK Sep 26 '15 at 08:44

1 Answers1