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How can I prevent Bash from writing history entries to disk? My ~/.bashrccontains the line

trap 'unset HISTFILE; exit' SIGHUP

but it doesn't have the desired effect. If I run history -c && history -w; exit and open a new terminal, the history is empty, but if I type some more commands and exit, the commands are in the history when I open a new terminal. Any ideas?

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1  
Have you tried removing write permission on the history file? – Ulrich Schwarz Jul 7 '15 at 6:17
    
@UlrichSchwarz That works but in my book it's more of a workaround than a clean solution. – August Karlstrom Jul 7 '15 at 6:22
up vote 4 down vote accepted

Put the following line in your ~/.bashrc:

unset HISTFILE

HISTFILE - The name of the file in which command history is saved. The default value is ~/.bash_history. If unset, the command history is not saved when a shell exits.

HISTFILE= works too.

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Yes, simply adding unset HISTFILE to ~/.bashrc seems to work. If you clean up your answer I can accept it. – August Karlstrom Jul 7 '15 at 9:06
    
@AugustKarlstrom, ok. Bonus: How do I open an incognito bash session? – Evgeny Vereshchagin Jul 7 '15 at 9:55

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