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Curate your shell history

You can make your shell history more useful by removing the typos and false starts.

Simon Tatham wrote an article recently called “Policy of transience”, explaining (among other things) why you might want to disable your shell history file. If I type a shell command that’s valuable – one that did something useful enough that I might want it again in future, and long and complicated enough that I’d be annoyed to have to figure it out a second time from scratch – then I can’t rely on it just happening to be in my.bash_history. The approach is taken from this Stack Overflow answer by Marlon Richert, who later wrote a zsh plugin called zsh-hist to make the history system easier to deal with.

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