Using only in-memory command history

Question

How can I prevent Bash from writing history entries to disk? My ~/.bashrccontains the line

trap 'unset HISTFILE; exit' SIGHUP

but it doesn't have the desired effect. If I run history -c && history -w; exit and open a new terminal, the history is empty, but if I type some more commands and exit, the commands are in the history when I open a new terminal. Any ideas?

Have you tried removing `w`rite permission on the history file? — Ulrich Schwarz, Jul 07 '15 at 06:17
@UlrichSchwarz That works but in my book it's more of a workaround than a clean solution. — August Karlstrom, Jul 07 '15 at 06:22

Evgeny Vereshchagin · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-07T10:14:07.203

4

Put the following line in your ~/.bashrc:

unset HISTFILE

HISTFILE - The name of the file in which command history is saved. The default value is ~/.bash_history. If unset, the command history is not saved when a shell exits.

HISTFILE= works too.

edited Jul 07 '15 at 10:14

answered Jul 07 '15 at 06:48

Evgeny Vereshchagin

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Yes, simply adding `unset HISTFILE` to `~/.bashrc` seems to work. If you clean up your answer I can accept it. – August Karlstrom Jul 07 '15 at 09:06
@AugustKarlstrom, ok. Bonus: [How do I open an incognito bash session?](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/158933/how-do-i-open-an-incognito-bash-session/211096#211096) – Evgeny Vereshchagin Jul 07 '15 at 09:55

Using only in-memory command history

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