Can you boil the commands that you don't want included in the history file to a series of regular expressions such as the following: ^cd ^ls ^rm If so, you can create a list of these regular expressions in a file, then use the ~/.bash_logout script to clean up the history: # clean up the history list (the cut part strips of history's line numbers) history | cut -b8- | egrep -v -f ~/.command_list > ~/history.tmp # flush the current history history -c # load the cleaned-up history ready to be written out on exit history -r ~/history.tmp # remove the temporary file rm -f ~/history.tmp You might also want to remove the comments and combine some of the above commands onto one line with the ";" separator to avoid some extra history clutter. -- Andy The only person to have all his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines