this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Can somebody please tell me what
history -cis?history displays a list of all commands you have run on the terminal since the history list was last cleared. It is invaluable for referring back to a big complex command or set of commands you ran at some point in the past. The -c flag clears that history.
Fuck, I just cleared my history.
What does it do again?
🤣
dont you also need history -w to save it?
on ubuntu -c doesnt actually clear it unless you also use -w
Yes, my comment only applies to the shell history in memory. -c clears history immediately, but you can still reload it from disk if you haven't overwritten that with -w. If you tend to close your terminal windows frequently and rely on the history feature between sessions, it would benefit you to learn about the intricacies of the on-disk copy of history and how its affected by writes, appends, clears, crashes, etc. I tend to leave my terminal windows open a long time and copy any complex commands out to my PKM if I need to save them for future sessions, so I generally try not to rely on .bash_history, but it has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.
It lets you clear the bash command history, either completely or selectively. Here's the GNU docs for the history builtin: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-History-Builtins.html#index-history
(I'm not too familiar, someone else can clarify: is this available outside bash?)
What's interesting to me is the
-aoption, which lets you "flush" the history for the current session without ending the session. I can see that being useful!