Apple - How can I delete saved commands from Terminal?

It's not a Mac OS feature but a shell feature. Assuming that you are using bash (the default):

  • the command history is stored in memory and persisted in a file (usually ~/.bash_history)
  • you can list and edit the history with the history command

With man bash (in the SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS section) you will find the description of the different options.

You can:

  • list the history entries

    $ history
    
  • delete the whole history

    $ history -c
    
  • delete a given entry

    $ history -d offset
    

Mac OS does not store anything anywhere.

bash, which is the shell that is run in the terminal, does store the command history.

The terminal command history is stored in a hidden file in your user directory called .bash_history

This means the file is: /Users/{username}/.bash_history

You have to enable "Show System Files" to see it (from the "View" menu in finder).

The file is just a textual list of everything you type in the shell. You can open it in TextEdit, or your editor of choice.


You should probably close Terminal.app to flush any recent changes into the file before making changes, or it may get overwritten from a version Terminal.app has in memory.


For Mac Terminal user

delete bash commands history with the following command $ echo '' > ~/.bash_history

For Mac zsh user

delete zsh commands history with the following command $ echo ''> ~/.zsh_hostory

Tags:

Macos

Terminal