MacOS – How to edit bash shell terminal history

bashcommand linehistorymacosterminal

I entered a password in a command line pro or in a terminal window by mistake and do not want to remove my whole history. My shell is bash.

How do I edit my bash history in Mac OS X?

Best Answer

Editing the .bash_history is just a matter of opening the file with an editor. There are a couple of ways you could achieve this.

In the Terminal just type vi ~/.bash_history, then edit the file as you want, and save. This option could be tricky, if you're not used to vi, of course.
Make the file visible by following these instructions, for instance, open it as any other file, modify it, and save.
In the Terminal just type open -e ~/.bash_history. This command will open the file with TextEdit, you can choose any other text editor, of course. Modify the file and save.

For the changes to be noticeable just restart the bash.

Related Solutions

How to make bash (Terminal.app) remember history of previous sessions

You'll need to tell bash where to keep your history file, and how many lines to keep:

# Set the location of your HISTFILE
echo "export HISTFILE=/Users/<USERNAME>/.bash_history" >> ~/.bash_profile

# Number of lines to keep (1000 in this example)
echo "export HISTFILESIZE=1000" >> ~/.bash_profile

# Set how many commands to keep in the current session history list
echo "export HISTSIZE=80" >> ~/.bash_profile

# Ignore commands that start with a space
echo "export HISTIGNORE=\"&:[ ]*:exit\"" >> ~/.bash_profile

How to clear the Bash history in OS X

To clear it, just delete the ~/.bash_history file. If you want to just remove the offending lines you can open ~/.bash_history in the editor of your choice. For me, this would be

emacs ~/.bash_history

and then going to the beginning of each bad line and pressing control ^+K.

Or your can just fill your .bash_history with empty. Run this: (including the >)

 > ~/.bash_history

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to make bash (Terminal.app) remember history of previous sessions

How to clear the Bash history in OS X

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