How to clear bash history compeletly?

Question

I want to clear all before command from history of my server. I use history -c it seems all things are cleared but when I ssh to the server,all commands are still there.

How can I clear them permanently?

Answer 1

~/.bash_history holds the history.

To clear the bash history completely on the server. You can open terminal and type cat /dev/null > ~/.bash_history

Other alternative way is to link ~/.bash_history to /dev/null

On my Ubuntu 12.10 box, The history comes back when I login back. I guess because the history entries has a copy in the memory and it will flush back to the file when you log out. The following command worked for me.

cat /dev/null > ~/.bash_history && history -c && exit

Answer 2

Another way to do this is deleting the ~/.bash_history file by using rm ~/.bash_history command. When you login another time, the .bash_history file will be automatically created.

Answer 3

There's another much simpler one: running history -c on the terminal prompt and gone are all entries in the bash_history file.

Answer 4

What to do:

In every open bash shell (you may have multiple terminals open):

history -w
history -c

Why: As noted above, history -c empties the file ~/.bash_history. It is important to note that bash shell does not immediately flush history to the bash_history file. So, it is important to (1) flush the history to the file, and (2) clear the history, in all terminals. That's what the commands above do.

Reference: http://www.giannistsakiris.com/index.php/2007/09/13/how-to-clear-bash-history-and-what-to-watch-out-for/