4.2 Shell history

It is imprudent to leave your invocations in your shell history. These are often stored away in your home directory, unless you do something to keep it out of your history. It should not be the end of the world because it is troublesome to also obtain the configuration file. Still, it is not wise to tempt fate.

If you use BASH for your shell,

HISTCONTROL=ignorespace:ignoredups
HISTIGNORE=gnu-pw-mgr *
unset HISTFILE

are your friends. Press the space bar before the command name, or specify that anything that looks like a “gnu-pw-mgr” command should be ignored or eliminate history entirely.

Also, if you put your password id’s on the command line, they become part of the process history and can be found. If that is a conceivable problem, then you may prefer to not put it on the command line and then type it in in response to a prompt. Your password id will not be echoed back as you type it.

This document was generated by Bruce Korb on June 30, 2018 using texi2html 1.82.