selective command history

Andy Blanchard zocalo at gmail.com
Fri Sep 17 19:45:24 UTC 2010


Can you boil the commands that you don't want included in the history
file to a series of regular expressions such as the following:

   ^cd
   ^ls
   ^rm

If so, you can create a list of these regular expressions in a file,
then use the ~/.bash_logout script to clean up the history:

   # clean up the history list (the cut part strips of history's line numbers)
   history | cut -b8- | egrep -v -f ~/.command_list > ~/history.tmp
   # flush the current history
   history -c
   # load the cleaned-up history ready to be written out on exit
   history -r ~/history.tmp
   # remove the temporary file
   rm -f ~/history.tmp

You might also want to remove the comments and combine some of the
above commands onto one line with the ";" separator to avoid some
extra history clutter.

-- 
Andy

The only person to have all his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe


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