On: Excerpt from ‘Flash Boys’ about Serge Aleynikov an...

[NoodleIncident]

A space before the command stops it from going in your history, though.

[ewams → NoodleIncident]

is that only for certain distro's because that isnt true on debian:

115 history

116 history (1 space)

117 history (2 spaces)

118 man passwd

119 passwd -a (1 space)

120 history

121 passwd -a (2 spaces)

122 history

[puls → ewams]

You can control this with the HISTCONTROL and HISTIGNORE environment variables: http://askubuntu.com/questions/15926/how-to-avoid-duplicate-...

[judk → puls]

Thank you for providing something of technical value in this conversation.

[dfc → ewams]

Much to my dismay this is not true. By default debian is configured to `ignoreboth` ie dupes and spaces. Like you I also change the debian default for HISTCONTROL. Lines 11-13 of /etc/skel/.bashrc:[^1]

  # don't put duplicate lines or lines starting with space in the history.
  # See bash(1) for more options
  HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth

[^1]: https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~doko/+junk/pkg-bash-debian/vie...

Provenance for /etc/skel/.bashrc:

  dfc@ronin:~$ dlocate /etc/skel/
  bash: /etc/skel/.bash_logout
  bash: /etc/skel/.bashrc
  bash: /etc/skel/.profile
  dfc@ronin:~$ apt-cache showsrc bash |grep ^Vcs-
  Vcs-Browser: https://code.launchpad.net/~doko/+junk/pkg-bash-debian
  Vcs-Bzr: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~doko/+junk/pkg-bash-debian

[paxswill → ewams]

It's controlled by the HISTCONTROL variable in bash. If it contains 'ignorespace' (or 'ignoreboth' to ignore duplicates as well). Check the man page for more details.

[judk → paxswill]

Anyone know why this incredible hack was introduced in hr first place? In my entire career this "feature" had only caused annoyance after copy-pasting a command.

Why not have a shell command called 'nohist' to wrap a command line?