[WBEL-users] The Terminal Remembers!

[Kirby C. Bohling]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 04:46:41PM -0600, Daniel J. Summers wrote:
> Hello...
> 
> I noticed earlier today that my terminal sessions are "remembering" the 
> entries I've typed across sessions (i.e., close one terminal, open 
> another, up-arrow, and there they are).  I've searched online, but have 
> obviously not hit on the right keywords just yet - where would one 
> configure the terminal to throw that information away when the session 
> ends?  I run some applications with passwords on the command line, so 
> I'd prefer they not stick around after the session.  I'm currently 
> running KDE with KTerm, although I noticed similar behavior with GNOME 
> as well.
> 
> Thanks - and happy new year!

Your running bash, what you are talking about is "history", there is
a file named .bash_history that is where they are stored.  I believe
there are several environment variables around that control this.
It defaults to 500 (according to the man page, but I always seem to
have 1000) on.

HISTSIZE
HISTFILE
HISTFILESIZE

I'd look for those to be set in /etc/profile.d or somewhere in /etc.

By the by, I solve this by having a stupid shell script which
outputs various passwords and putting them in backticks, then the
password is stored in a file with very limited permissions, if you
ever run something in cron, /var/log/cron will store the full
commandline and password, I've found it easier to just get over the
password being stored in the clear.  

	Thanks,
		Kirby