Clean your tracks well

I have been doing lots of mischievous stuff on a Linux machine , and had to be sure that I clean my tracks properly. While playing with bash history every one seems to know that "history -c" command clears the history. But on seldom occasions I could see that my bash history was getting restored magically sans few last commands.

Digging deeper in the man pages, I realized that bash history is stored in not one but two places.
  1. .bash-history file in user home.
  2. As an in-memory file.

Now this brings some interesting possibilities as the in-memory file is written back to the .bash-history at times (when a user terminal closes for once). With the new found knowledge I devised a way to wipe out my bash history for sure. You need to take care of three things,

  1. Open only one terminal for the user whose history you want to remove.
  2. Delete ~/.bash-history file.
  3. run history -c command

Ta da !! I haven't seen the history coming back again ever. Back to my mischievous stuff :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Those Bastards - Delhi Bomb blast

It started as a good day, after four weeks I did not have my mysterious weekend fever. I was thinking about reviewing the amazing Chrome from Google or just write about my best friend, Monu's , engagement. And then as the French said, Le temps détruit tou , Delhi was shattered by the Bomb blasts, as of now I am not sure if the mayhem is over, there were four Blasts around Delhi and it was, mildly put, Sickening. Suddenly my gut twisted, as I saw the places where I have spent most of my times shopping, having fun, hanging around since my childhood, turned to hell. Twisted metal, blood, wounded injured bodies, Fear and tears in everyone's eyes. These places were frequented by young people, all of them were in prime of their lives. Many are dead, some will be disabled, some will go back home with memories of this evening haunting them for ever. It saddens me, I am not sure if I ever had this feeling before - the anger, the fear of uncertainty, the sorrow, the ache in my heart a...
Read more

Bygone days !!

Image
I had planned to start updating this blog only when I get a broadband at home. Had been wasting precious time at office on this. But it seems that it will take ages for me to get a broadband, reasons vary from bureaucracy in public sector to selfish economic interests of Pvt. Sector :) So here I am with nothing new to say, so may be we can discuss past. I was in one of my MS classes, the ‘supporting-your-eyelids-with-your-hand-lest-they-close’ kind of class, when our teacher narrated this interesting purchase by NCDC, India somewhere in 1980’s. NCDC stands for National Cooperative for Development Cooperation, one of the numerous government organizations setup primarily to spend money and make there bosses rich :). So NCDC ordered a computer with following configuration in early 80’s RAM 128 KB HDD 10 MB FDD yes, supported 360 KB floppies (now comes the best part) Speed 5 MHz in Turbo Mode I did not ask for more information, as speaking up generally attracts attention, and that is n...
Read more

If I were laid (off) :)

Image
No pun intended in the Title :). But seriously, have you ever wondered what will you do if for some reasons you were handed a pink slip tomorrow morning ! Not an unexpected scenario in these troubled times. I have. The list of five things I may opt for if I am laid off work tomorrow morning: 1. Take my family to a nice but not-so-expensive vacation (probably a day long ) before I break the news to them. 2. Start looking for a new job from day 0. 3. Start an Internet venture, because it needs almost zero investment and potentially can keep me occupied and productive forever. (I have ideas) 4. With bad market conditions lease a commercial space on bargain prices. Now start selling some stuff (Basic Food, Education, and Health are recession proof products). 5. Start pedalling stuff on ebay and start looking up on inventing low-risk cyber-scam (always wanted to do this !!!) Do I sound looking up to a pink-slip. Maybe. What are your five things to do after a layoff? Leave comments.
Read more