Excluding Commands from History

Sometimes you don't want a command in your history and Atuin gives you four ways to exclude the commands.

Prefix with a space

Most shells support "ignorespace": a command typed with a leading space isn't saved to history. Atuin honors this convention, and it's the quickest way to keep a single command out.

 echo "this won't be saved"  # note the leading space

Bash with bash-preexec

When using bash-preexec (not ble.sh), there's a known issue where ignorespace isn't fully honored. The command won't appear in Atuin, but may still appear in your bash history. See installation for details.

Filter by command: `history_filter`

history_filter excludes any command matching a regular expression:

history_filter = [
    "^ls$",           # exclude bare 'ls', but not 'ls -la'
    "^cd ",           # exclude cd commands
    "--password",     # exclude anything with a password flag
]

Patterns are unanchored, so secret matches anywhere in the command. Use ^ and $ when you want to match the whole command exactly.

Filter by directory: `cwd_filter`

cwd_filter excludes every command run from a matching directory:

cwd_filter = [
    "^/tmp",                    # nothing run from /tmp
    "/node_modules/",           # nothing run inside any node_modules
    "^/home/user/scratch",      # a scratch directory
]

These patterns are unanchored regular expressions too, matched against the working directory path.

Skip Atuin entirely for a tool

If a tool spawns interactive shells and you'd rather it recorded nothing at all, guard the atuin init call in your shell config:

# In .bashrc or .zshrc
if [[ -z "${MY_TOOL_SESSION}" ]]; then
    eval "$(atuin init bash)"
fi

Then configure the tool to set MY_TOOL_SESSION=1 when it spawns a shell. See the atuin init reference for the other ways to change what the plugin sets up.

Commands from AI agents

You don't need to exclude AI agent commands to keep them out of your way. Atuin tags them with the agent that ran them and hides them from interactive search by default — see AI Agent Hooks.

Cleaning up commands you already recorded

Filters only apply going forward. To remove entries recorded before you added a filter, run atuin history prune:

# See what would be removed
atuin history prune --dry-run

# Remove it
atuin history prune

This deletes existing entries matching your current history_filter and cwd_filter. For deleting entries that don't match a filter, see Deleting History.

Secrets are filtered automatically

Independently of your own filters, Atuin refuses to record commands that look like they contain credentials — AWS keys, GitHub and npm tokens, Slack webhooks, Stripe keys, and more. This is on by default. For the full list, see secrets_filter.