Only if HISTCONTROL is assigned 'ignoreboth' or 'ignorespace'.

Or prompt for it:

   grep `read -sp "password: "; echo "$REPLY" | tr -d "\n" | shasum | cut -c6-40` hacked.txt

I couldn't really find a good reason to use a .bash_history. I linked mine to /dev/null and never looked back. (heh)

Ctrl+r history search? I'd tend to maintaining a complete history log so that when I've forgotten the one liner I used to rotate my videos 2 years ago I can easily recall it.

2 years? Just how big is your history file?

I thought 16k entries might be reasonable but that doesn't even last 3 weeks for me. I think there might have been some issue with slow disk seeks so at some point I restricted it to that many.

I guess it probably it would be better to regularly backup the history file to deal with possible some accidental truncations and issues when running multiple shells concurrently, but probably the overall effort to set up such a system would outweight the benefits.

export HISTSIZE=0

Alternative and more dramatic method of preventing it being written to your bash history:

  kill -9 $$

kill -9 -1 is better than kill -9 $$

How so?

That post was a troll. -1 is a special PID: It indicates that all processes that you can kill should be.

Kill -9 -1 as root is a surefire way to make a system stop doing anything, fast.