On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 02:52, Reg Clemens wrote: > OK, this error has been in the shells for a long time. > > If you bring up a new window, or just a shell as a regular user, > and then type 'history' you see what you should expect, one line > with the history command. > > If you now do a su, and become root, and then do the same 'history' > command you will see several hundred lines of history from who knows > how many previous sessions as root. > > If you bring up a second window, and become root there too, doing the > 'history' command will show the same -history- as the first (sigh) > > Shouldn't these things be truncated when the root shell closes down? >From 'man bash' that is your choice. In the section on 'Shell Variables' you can see this: HISTFILE The name of the file in which command history is saved (see HISTORY below). The default value is ~/.bash_history. If unset, the command history is not saved when an interactive shell exits. So, if you want an empty history on startup, make sure HISTFILE is unset. -- C. Linus Hicks <lhicks@xxxxxxxxx>