# How to Stop Commands from Appearing in Bash History

I usually don't want my secrets to show up in my bash history in the `$HOME/.bash_history` file. Long ago, folks told me that using a trailing space will solve this issue, but it didn't. Apparently, there's some extra stuff to do

Just do

```bash
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
```

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6475524/how-do-i-prevent-commands-from-showing-up-in-bash-history#29188490](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6475524/how-do-i-prevent-commands-from-showing-up-in-bash-history#29188490)

The above also helps with getting rid of duplicate commands from the bash history, which is pretty cool 🆒😎👌 since I use `fzf` [https://github.com/junegunn/fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf) to search through my history and choose commands, and when I search through a command with some strings, sometimes same result shows up multiple times - so many times that it's crazy and I just wish it just showed one unique result and get rid of duplicates, now this is possible because `fzf` looks at my `$HOME/.bash_history` only to look at all my past commands and if the bash history file contains unique commands, all is good, right? ;) By the way, I use `fzf` as part of my `Ctrl + r` keybinding for reverse search over all commands.

`fzf` has so many ideas for keybindings themselves - [https://github.com/junegunn/fzf?tab=readme-ov-file#key-bindings-for-command-line](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf?tab=readme-ov-file#key-bindings-for-command-line) , apart from community's ideas 💡😄