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FLAVIO COPES
flaviocopes.com
2026

Fish Shell, how to avoid recording commands to history

By Flavio Copes

Learn how to run commands in Fish shell without saving them to history by starting a private session with fish --private, then exiting when you are done.

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Sometimes you want to run some commands in the shell, but you don’t want them to be stored in the shell history.

With Fish Shell, my default shell, it’s quite easy. You just have to start a new shell with:

fish --private

then you exit the shell.

I wrote an article on the Fish Shell basics if you’re interested in trying it. I highly recommend Fish over any other shell, due to its ease and “it just works” philosophy.

Tagged: CLI · All topics
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