Re: Preventing a single command from being saved in history

["Benjamin R. Haskell" <zsh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 18 Feb 2009, Allan Caffee wrote:

> Is there a way to prevent an arbitrary command line from being stored in 
> the shell history (for any longer than one command)?  A use of this for 
> example might be if I were to set a password into the environment or 
> pass some sensitive information to a program on the command line.
>
> If this functionality does not currently exist how difficult would it be 
> to provide a precommand modifier?  I know the internals for this kind of 
> manipulation are already in place for options like HistNoStore and 
> HistNoFunctions. I've only glanced over the source code but it seems 
> like all that would be needed is to have should_ignore_line return 1 if 
> the precommand modifier is in effect.

I assume you're looking for histignorespace (hist_ignore_space if you're 
rooting through man pages)?  Then any command that starts with a space (or 
any alias that expands as such) is ignored.

The 'alias' thing is useful, for example, to hide some things I don't 
really care to have in history:

alias fg=' builtin fg'
alias bg=' builtin bg'
alias rehash=' builtin rehash'

Best,
Ben