I accidentally typed password into bash command line

I accidentally typed my password into bash command line, mistaking the Last login: ... line for Wrong password (I was in a hurry). What do I do to cover my trace?

What I did was editing .bash_history and deleting the offending line (had to relogin once to see the password appear in the file so I could delete it, and relogin again to see it disappear from the history available under UPARROW key).

Is there any other place where the command history could be saved? The system is CentOS 6.5.

You can remove just the offending line from bash's history, instead of clearing the entire history. Simply remove the line with the -d flag, then save (write) the new history with the -w flag:

$ history
351 ssh [email protected]
352 my_password
$ history -d 352
$ history -w

There are two parts to this:

• bash stores the history in a file ~/.bash_history which is, by default, written to at the end of the session
• the history that is kept in memory

To be safe, you need to clear it from the session:

history -c

and truncate the history file as needed:

> ~/.bash_history

If your session in which you typed the password is still open, then another way to cover your trace is to set the HISTFILE variable to the null device so that the history would not be written to ~/.bash_history when the session exits:

export HISTFILE=/dev/null