Hacker News Reader

Comment by alister | Hacker News Reader

What an interesting contrast in attitudes toward privacy:

He makes an extraordinary effort to maintain his bash history whereas I jump through hoops to delete my history (on logout using a .bash_logout file).

I also set my browser to maintain no history, disable saving of chats in everything, delete caches wherever possible, and generally wish that apps and programs had an option to save zero information on exit!

If I want "history" beyond a session, I'll explicitly make a shell alias for a command that I want to remember, or make bookmark for a site I want to revisit, etc.

View on HN

Your bash history is stored on your computer, so there isn't really a difference toward privacy unless you permit anyone sit on your computer.

Furthermore, for many people, using the command line is part of their daily job. Not keeping a history and/or log, is akin to compiling your source code, keeping the binary and deleting the source.

If there are certain things you don't want in your bash history, use the ignorespace capability and explicitly do not store them.

You can do HISTFILESIZE=0. That way the .bash_history file is never written to, but you can still get the history that's in memory.

If you write it to disk, it could available on the disk via an undelete tool or via a backup - which is a concern if you ever accidentally paste a password onto the command line.

Yea, I don't know why you would do that, why would you cripple your own tools like that and pay a heavy price each day in productivity and convenience to protect against the really insignificant risk of losing... what exactly?

Now paranoia is a scale, and we are, I'm sure, gaussianly distributed on it. I approve of this, as it provides a nice safeguard against extinction events against the hump in the middle. But man, I glad AF I'm not on your side of the curve. That would suck.

Thanks for standing in the gap.

You should

    ln -sf /dev/null ~/.bash_history

!

Better yet,

unset HISTFILE

I'm with you, I've had

    export HISTFILE=/dev/null

in my .bashrc for 20 years. I just don't see the appeal of persistent history. And I've seen too many intrusion pastes where passwords and databases are pulled out of the bash history file.

In a work environment with many complex shell commands to perform daily tasks shell history is the most efficient way to repeat tasks with complex command lines performed weeks/months ago. Documentation, wikis etc are always slightly lacking/stale and are less effective than simply seeing how you did it last.

I see the appeal of this approach. Browser histories are nice in theory because you could search for what you want to revisit, but it never works very well. It'd be better to learn to develop a trigger happy bookmark finger.

I still try to keep my site history available, but it's very awkward with the amount of non-family content that I visit. Oh well.

Really? Works extremely well for me. I use a separate browser for porn.

If firefox would do full-text history searches, it'd be better. Solely on titles it's hard to find anything you might want.

It searches tags and urls too. I'd like a full body-text search for bookmarked pages or something similar, I'm a hoarder (I actually have a script to archive all my bookmarked pages, via wget, so i can grep them).

Also, https://support.mozilla.org/t5/Basic-Browsing/Awesome-Bar-Se..., last couple of paragraphs site hire to use the modifiers in address-bar search for those who don't know about that.

Create a new user Switch to it Launch a browser Start private mode "Go shopping" Delete and purge the user Burn the hard drive

My history file is a symlink into a directory synced to google drive. That's easy and appropriate security. You can turn on 2FA. People who think that's inappropriate security are forgetting all the items (like convenience) on the two sides of the cost-benefit analysis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com