Ubuntu – How to remove the last 5 lines in bash history

14.04bashbash-historycommand line

How can I remove the last 5 lines in bash history? So that when I reload the Ubuntu server, or restart it they're not there at all?

history -c only removes it from current session, but when I re-login I see the commands again, I want to clear the last 5.

I've run:

history

Then i'll see the numbers of the commands e.g:

  489  cd ..
  490  cd .zshrc
  491  cat .zshrc

Then I run for example:

history -d 489
history -c

Then i close terminal and reopen it and i still see line 489 it was only deleted for that current session, how do I delete it permentantly from all sessions going forward?

Please advise.

Best Answer

There are different ways to accomplish this task, but lets clarify something before going further.

There is a file named: ~/.bash_history, which contains your older terminal sessions history, whenever you close your terminal, your history will be saved there.

At the same time the history of your old sessions along with current session is temporary accessible by history commands until you close the terminal which then will be saved into ~/.bash_history file.

So if you remove 5 lines at the end of ~/.bash_history, then closing terminal will cause your current command to be accessible at next sessions.

So if I do a wc on .bash_history: 

wc -l ~/.bash_history

Most of the time I'll get a smaller number than of history | wc -l.

If you want to remove the last 5 line of the file, you can use this command:

for i in {1..5}; do sed -i '$d' .bash_history; done;

And if you want to keep all history except last 5 command issued in current session run:

history | awk '{ print $2 }' | head -n -5 > .bash_history

Don't forget to run history -c too.

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