Powershell history

TheTwist · March 15, 2019

Is there a way to turn off history (using the up arrow) from previous commands on a new Window in Powershell?

For example when I close Powershell and I open a new window, those commands are not available?

Spev · March 15, 2019

I'm not sure there's a setting to do this so that every PowerShell instance will drop the contents of its session history automatically...

However, you can do this manually. Your PowerShell history is actually stored in a text file. You can find the location of your text file by entering this:

(Get-PSReadlineOption).HistorySavePath

You can simply use the Remove-Item cmdlet to delete the file. (Or just do it in the file explorer)

Remove-Item (Get-PSReadlineOption).HistorySavePath

After entering this command, the history file is delete, and the next command entered in PowerShell will be saved to that file (If you deleted it with that command then a new file is created). This is just an ordinary text file with each line being a PowerShell command entered. You can go through and pick and choose and delete certain commands and then save the file (I guess if you wanted to be malicious and hide that you ran some command, but still have the rest of the history show up). You can even just go ahead and enter a new line of random text and save the file. In your next PowerShell instance you can Up Arrow and it will display the text you entered in the text file even if it was never entered in PowerShell, since all it does is parse through the lines of that file.

Anyways, maybe some of this info was helpful to you, but I could not find anyway (like a setting) to drop all history changes upon exiting PowerShell automatically. However, if you just want to delete some, or all, of your history, it can be done as shown.