Automatically clear that bash history!

Bash stores a history of commands that were executed by a user in a plain text file (.bash_history). Well, actually it stores those previously ran commands in memory first, then writes it out to .bash_history. This allows you to easily scroll through and run a previously entered command.

However, as you probably realize, this also becomes a security issue when you're running commands that contain sensitive information... like echo "MyPassword" | docker secret create db_pass -, which you wouldn't ever want to be logged in plain text. Because of this, it's important to keep that history clear and because I'm forgetful (just ask my wife) it becomes important to just have it clear automatically.

Crontab: Clearing bash history

Using the Crontab editor we can easily setup a job to clear it for us at whatever cron schedule we specify. For my example we're going to clear it at 11pm everynight.

crontab -e

Once the contab editor opens:

# Clear bash history everynight at 11pm
00 23 * * * cat /dev/null > ~/.bash_history

Pro Tip: If you're new to cron syntax, https://crontab.guru/ is an excellent resource for cron schedule expressions.

The Manual Method

To clear bash history on demand you can run:

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

This clears the .bash_history log and the log that gets stored in memory before it writes to .bash_history

cat /dev/null > ~/.bash_history clears the bash history text file and history -c clears the history stored in memory.

Bonus (user-data.sh)

You can leverage user-data.sh and have this contab configured and running automatically when you spinup a new server! How awesome is that!

crontab -l -u root | echo "00 23 * * * cat /dev/null > ~/.bash_history" | crontab -u root -

Hope this helps! Hit me up on Twitter: @Mineo27 if you have any issues/questions.