How to Clear Your Terminal History on Linux or macOS

Press the “up” arrow in the Mac or Linux command line and you’ll see the last command you ran. Keep pressing “up” and you’ll see more commands; you can go back days, months, or even years. This is called your history, and it’s very convenient. If you made a mistake typing a long command, simply press “up” and fix the problem. If you want to re-connect to an SSH server you used the other day, simply press “up” until you see the relevant command. It’s useful, but there’s also a potential security problem here, particularly if you accidentally typed a password in plain text at some point. How does one clear this history? Long story short, you can do so with two commands: history -c , followed by rm ~/.bash_history . Here’s what those commands do, for greater clarity. Clear the Current Session’s History Your history can be broke down into two chunks. There’s your current sessions’ history, and there’s your long-term history. Our first command, history -c , deals with the c...