Disabling zsh history for a given shell session

· Updated · 1 min read · CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 Apache-2.0
🤖 Includes some LLM-derived content

This last week I've been doing a few bits of working with secrets - some of which I've needed to store in local environment variables, or pass as arguments to commands, and I've been going in and scrubbing my ~/.zsh_history after the fact, to make sure the secrets don't retain in my history, on disk.

However, I wondered if there was a way to temporarily disable history storing. I started by asking GitHub Copilot, and GPT-4.1 responded with running the following:

unset  HISTFILE
export HISTSIZE=0
export SAVEHIST=0

This was actually a valid thing to do stops that zsh session from retaining any history, until you start a new shell, where it will be reset.

After running this, i.e. ~/.zsh_history won't contain any of the commands, other than noting that you disabled history.

Written by Jamie Tanna's profile image Jamie Tanna on , and last updated on .

Content for this article is shared under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International, and code is shared under the Apache License 2.0.

#blogumentation #zsh.

🤖 Content in this blog post includes code derived from the following LLMs:

PurposeModelNotes
Codegpt:4.1
Editorial supportNo usage
Prose (verbatim or edited)No usage
Images, visualisation, data and/or metricsNo usage

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