4 ms·

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

by alister 10y ago

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.

jcsalterego 10y ago
You should ln -sf /dev/null ~/.bash_history !
- subway 10y ago
  Better yet, unset HISTFILE
pvdebbe 10y ago
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.
- jplayer01 10y ago
  Really? Works extremely well for me. I use a separate browser for porn.
  - pvdebbe 10y ago
    If firefox would do full-text history searches, it'd be better. Solely on titles it's hard to find anything you might want.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      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-Search-your-Firefox-bookmarks-history-and-tabs-from/ta-p/1485#w_how-can-i-control-what-results-the-location-bar-shows-me 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.
  - isostatic 10y ago
    Create a new user Switch to it Launch a browser Start private mode "Go shopping" Delete and purge the user Burn the hard drive
rythie 10y ago
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.
andmarios 10y ago
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.
ageofwant 10y ago
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.
__david__ 10y ago
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.
- Myrmornis 10y ago
  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.
Myrmornis 10y ago
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.

by alister 10y ago

jcsalterego 10y ago

You should ln -sf /dev/null ~/.bash_history !

subway 10y ago
Better yet, unset HISTFILE

pvdebbe 10y ago

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.

jplayer01 10y ago
Really? Works extremely well for me. I use a separate browser for porn.
- pvdebbe 10y ago
  If firefox would do full-text history searches, it'd be better. Solely on titles it's hard to find anything you might want.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    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-Search-your-Firefox-bookmarks-history-and-tabs-from/ta-p/1485#w_how-can-i-control-what-results-the-location-bar-shows-me 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.
- isostatic 10y ago
  Create a new user Switch to it Launch a browser Start private mode "Go shopping" Delete and purge the user Burn the hard drive

rythie 10y ago

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.

andmarios 10y ago

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.

ageofwant 10y ago

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.

__david__ 10y ago

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.

Myrmornis 10y ago
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.

Myrmornis 10y ago

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.