I got bored while I was paying bills so I decided that I wanted to automate a bill that doesn't have a very good automatic payment method. I decided to use Ruby and Mechanize to perform the task. Since I don't want the script just hanging around with my customer or my credit card information, I decided to pass those values into the script from the command line. To avoid leaving my password and credit card number in the history file, I learned about HISTIGNORE. This little gem is pretty easy to use but it basically ignores any line that matches the commands separated by a colon. A default that I found on [Using Bash's History Effectively](http://www.talug.org/events/20030709/cmdline_history.html) was to use something like: export HISTIGNORE="&:ls:[bf]g:exit" He also suggested to add `[ \t]*` to allow for keeping any command starting with a space or tab out of the history. I'll definitely be using this and now I just have to remember to use a space. 2010-01-31T02:00:15Z 59 true 2010-01-30T21:00:15Z 2010-01-31T02:04:24Z