clear history from shell

[Grizzly]

Thursday, May 19, 2016  at 8:20, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
Re: clear history from shell (at least in part)

>On Thu, 19 May 2016 06:51:51 +0100, Grizzly wrote:
>>Wednesday, May 18, 2016  at 14:53, MR ZenWiz wrote:
>>Re: clear history from shell (at least in part)

>>>That's what the HISTCONTROL=erasedups is supposed to do.

>>>In my experience, this doesn't always (or often) work - I get scads of
>>>duplicate entries within in terminal window, but I have mine set to
>>>HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth:erasedups.  I'm not sure that works too well
>>>either.  

>>From what I have read (but not tested), it only works with consecutive
>>commands i.e.

>>Apt-get update
>>Apt-get update
>>
>>would storee one Apt-get update

>>but

>>Apt-get update 
>>Apt-get dist-upgrade
>>Apt-get update
>>Apt-get dist-upgrade

>>would store them all?

>What was your source of reading?

I read the text you qouted
"A value of ignoredups causes lines matching the previous history entry to not 
be  saved"

I took that to mean "The" previous (singular) entry, after testing it works as 
I expected (as above)

I did miss the distiction bewteen and have tested erasedups now and it "seems" 
to do what I want, the most current use of a command is saved to history

>I didn't test it either, because I prefer to use a default history for
>the very good reasons I already pointed out, but assumed I would like
>to have another history, I would test it. Anyway, you are confusing
>"erasedups" and "ignoredups".

>A value of erasedups causes all previous lines matching the current line to be
>removed from  the  history list before that line is saved.  Any value not 
>in the above list is ignored.