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A comment on Show HN: HiSHtory: Your shell history in context, synced, and queryable. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: HiSHtory: Your shell history in context, synced,... by capableweb on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @09:00AM (#33434995)
Pro-tip: if you wanna hide stuff from your shell history, enter a space/blank before the actual command.

Not that it probably would have helped in this situation, but maybe useful for others.

Usually if I have to enter secrets in my shell, I do something like this in order to save the useful stuff to history but hiding the secrets:

- ` export PASSWORD=hunter2` (notice the space before "export")

- `service-cli login username $PASSWORD` (no space before, gets saved to shell history)

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Re:Show HN: HiSHtory: Your shell history in context, synced,... by Cockbrand on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @09:14AM (#33435184)
While ignoring commands preceded by a space character is absolutely one of my very favorite shell features, it usually isn't enabled by default (YMMV).

HISTCONTROL=ignorespace # bash

setopt hist_ignore_space # zsh

These go into ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc, respectively. zsh is really smart about this and always enables you to retrieve the immediate previous line with arrow-up, no matter whether it's got preceding whitespace or not.

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Re:Show HN: HiSHtory: Your shell history in context, synced,... by 400thecat on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @09:27AM (#33435393)
why use `export` ? That is a terrible idea.
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Re:Show HN: HiSHtory: Your shell history in context, synced,... by ddworken on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @10:43PM (#33446283)
+1 to prefixing with a space. hiSHtory supports this out of the box so that anything prefixed with a space isn't recorded (even if your shell doesn't do that by default!). And if you do ever mess up, `hishtory redact` can be used to delete history entries.
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Re:Show HN: HiSHtory: Your shell history in context, synced,... by remram on Friday November 04, 2022 @11:43PM (#33477687)
Other options:

- read -s PASSWORD

- service-cli login username $(cat)

At least you probably don't want to use `export` when setting the variable.

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