Bad History when SuperUser.

[C. Linus Hicks]

On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 02:52, Reg Clemens wrote:
> OK, this error has been in the shells for a long time.
> 
> If you bring up a new window, or just a shell as a regular user,
> and then type 'history' you see what you should expect, one line
> with the history command.
> 
> If you now do a su, and become root, and then do the same 'history'
> command you will see several hundred lines of history from who knows
> how many previous sessions as root.
> 
> If you bring up a second window, and become root there too, doing the
> 'history' command will show the same -history- as the first (sigh)
> 
> Shouldn't these things be truncated when the root shell closes down?

>From 'man bash' that is your choice. In the section on 'Shell Variables'
you can see this:

       HISTFILE
              The  name  of  the file in which command history is
              saved (see HISTORY below).  The  default  value  is
              ~/.bash_history.   If unset, the command history is
              not saved when an interactive shell exits.

So, if you want an empty history on startup, make sure HISTFILE is
unset.

-- 
C. Linus Hicks <lhicks at nc.rr.com>