Welcome back to snippets, the series where I share small scripts or commands.
As always, if you want the following change to be available everywhere, open
your profile file (notepad $PROFILE), and paste it in there.
Today's snippet is actually more of a configuration change than a script. In
zsh, there's a feature called HIST_IGNORE_SPACE that prevents commands from
being added to your history if they start with a space. This is useful for
commands that contain sensitive information, like passwords.
PowerShell doesn't have this feature built-in, and its history is actually a little more complex than bourne-like shells, due to originally using built-in commandlets, then switching to an originally community-contributed "PSReadLine" module.
Note: If you're using a somewhat recent version of PowerShell, the following snippet should work for you. You can check if you're using PSReadLine by running
Set-PSReadLineOption, and seeing if you get an unrecognized command error or not.
On to the snippet!
Set-PSReadLineOption -AddToHistoryHandler {
param ([string] $line)
return $line[0] -ne " "
}This snippet is quite a bit simpler than other snippets, with only a couple of
elements to describe. The curly braces after the -AddToHistoryHandler
argument creates a script block (akin to a function), which takes a single
string parameter. We check if the first character of the line is a space; if it
is not a space, $true is returned, and the command is added to the history.
If you would prefer to have history forget a different pattern, you can change the script block to return a boolean matching whichever pattern you'd like to ignore.