After a lot of use, your history file can become full of a lot of old commands… once in a while, it can be useful (and safer) to clean them up.
NOTE: this can be especially important if you have ever used a password as a command line parameter as it is stored without encryption in a text file.
Preferred:
cat /dev/null > ~/.bash_history && history -c && exit
Also useful:
history -c
history -w
REFERENCES:
