Environment & Shell Customization (Aliases/Functions/.Bashrc)

Stop polluting your shell history with repetitive junk

🧩 The Challenge

You know that feeling when you press the up arrow and have to scroll past thirty lines of cd, ls, and grep just to find that one complicated docker command you ran five minutes ago? I hate it when my shell history becomes a dumpster fire.

💡 The Fix

Just tell bash to ignore those common commands so they never show up in your history file in the first place. It makes your history actually usable again.

HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth:erasedups
HISTIGNORE="ls:ls -*:cd:cd ..:pwd:exit:history"

⚙️ Why It Works

Setting ignoreboth handles the whitespace and duplicates, while HISTIGNORE keeps your history clean by filtering out the boring noise. It effectively keeps the history file focused on the commands you might actually want to run again later.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Add export HISTFILESIZE=10000 to your bashrc so you can keep a deep history without it becoming a memory hog.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 9/21/2026