If you care about your command history, I would advise against doing this unless you are truly a sed expert: $ sed -i '/secret-command/d' $HISTFILE # dele

If you care about your command history, I would advise against doing this unless you are truly a sed expert: $ sed -i '/secret-command/d' $HISTFILE # deletion of history line containing 'secret-command' Because if you get it even slightly wrong, you could easily hose your entire history. If it were me, I would just use an editor to delete that line (or two, if timestamps are enabled).