About

Shell History Cleaner is a simple program that cleans the bash/shell history for you.

Shell history is the commands that you see when pressing Up or Ctrl R (to search) in the terminal.

Use

Install Rust/cargo. After that:

cargo install --force shell-history-cleaner

shell-history-cleaner --dedup "$HISTFILE"  # remove duplicates
shell-history-cleaner --dedup --remove 'youtube-dl .*' "$HISTFILE"  # also remove video downloads

Help

USAGE:
    shell-history-cleaner [OPTIONS] <TARGET_FILE>

ARGS:
    <TARGET_FILE>
            Target file to clean. You can use "$HISTFILE" to clean up the shell history.

OPTIONS:
    -d, --dedup
            De-duplicate lines to only keep one last occurrence of each dup.

    -r, --remove <REMOVE>
            Lines to remove. For example, 'yt-dlp.*' will remove lines starting with 'yt-dlp'.
            Can be specified multiple times.
            
            The patterns are regular expressions, assuming the whole line is matched, as defined
            here: https://docs.rs/regex/latest/regex/#syntax
            
            Another real-life example:
            '(ps aux.*|git checkout .*|git branch .*| .*|yt-dlp .*|chmod .*|echo .*|man .*)'

    -h, --help
            Print help information

Useful references

Make your bash history unlimited: https://superuser.com/a/664061/162466

Implementation details

This program loads the file contents in memory. Don't use this script if your history file is 1Gb (hope not it's not though:)

License

GPLv3 or, at your option, any later version of the license.
Main GitLab repo: https://gitlab.com/vn971/shell-history-cleaner
Github mirror: https://github.com/vn971/shell-history-cleaner