history displays a list of all commands you have run on the terminal since the history list was last cleared. It is invaluable for referring back to a big complex command or set of commands you ran at some point in the past. The -c flag clears that history.

[–] zemja@programming.dev 11 points 10 months ago

Fuck, I just cleared my history.

[–] caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What does it do again?

[–] survivalmachine@beehaw.org 3 points 9 months ago

🤣

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

dont you also need history -w to save it?

on ubuntu -c doesnt actually clear it unless you also use -w

[–] survivalmachine@beehaw.org 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yes, my comment only applies to the shell history in memory. -c clears history immediately, but you can still reload it from disk if you haven't overwritten that with -w. If you tend to close your terminal windows frequently and rely on the history feature between sessions, it would benefit you to learn about the intricacies of the on-disk copy of history and how its affected by writes, appends, clears, crashes, etc. I tend to leave my terminal windows open a long time and copy any complex commands out to my PKM if I need to save them for future sessions, so I generally try not to rely on .bash_history, but it has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.

[–] akdas@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It lets you clear the bash command history, either completely or selectively. Here's the GNU docs for the history builtin: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-History-Builtins.html#index-history

(I'm not too familiar, someone else can clarify: is this available outside bash?)

What's interesting to me is the -a option, which lets you "flush" the history for the current session without ending the session. I can see that being useful!