Hack 59. Force history not to remember a particular command using HISTCONTROL

by Ramesh

When you execute a command, you can instruct history to ignore the command by setting HISTCONTROL to ignorespace AND typing a space in front of the command as shown below. I can see lot of junior sysadmins getting excited about this, as they can hide a command from the history.

It is good to understand how ignorespace works. But, as a best practice, don’t hide purposefully anything from history.

# export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace
 
# ls –ltr
 
# pwd
 
#  service httpd stop 
 
[Note:  There is a space at the beginning of service, to ignore this command from history]
 
# history | tail -3
       67  ls –ltr
       68  pwd
       69  history | tail -3