Wait, what?
$> history
...
12345 some_command --username myusername --password mypassword
This comes up fairly often with poorly designed CLI's. Wiping your bash history after running the command isn't an unreasaonble hack.
Edit/Addendum: Although there are other (perhaps better) ways to achieve the same effect, the main point is that doing a "history -c" should be considered no more suspicious than e.g. closing a document to clear your "undo" history.
read -p "Password: " -s password; some_command --username myusername --password "$password"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
Why not have a shell command called 'nohist' to wrap a command line?
# don't put duplicate lines or lines starting with space in the history.
# See bash(1) for more options
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
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