Deleting an item from bash history

I was pecking away commands on the bash command line and, without paying attention, I typed in my password when I thought it was needed for a command. But looking up I saw that I was not getting a password request, but was on the command line. Aside from being thankful that I do not use a valid command for a password, I was concerned that I was leaving my password in plain text in my bash history. My home directory is encrypted, so there is little chance that someone will get access to it, but I wanted to delete it nonetheless.



To view the bash history, type

history

You will see something like this:

943 mvn install
944 top
945 MyP@SsW0rD!
946 kill 12667
947 free
948 history
949 exit

Find the line number of the entry you want to delete—in this case #945—and type:

history -d 945

(Obviously you should replace the 945 with the item number you want to delete!)

Type the history command again and you will see that the entry is gone.