IPython: How to wipe IPython's history selectively & securely?

Question

I have been learning how to use the paramiko package only to discover that all I stored passwords in plain text in IPython\'s %hist. Not so good.

Answer 1

If you want to delete history from a particular session, run:

sqlite ~/.ipython/profile_default/history.sqlite

Note that on some systems, you will need to run sqlite3 rather than sqlite.

Inside SQLite:

select * from history;
# session is the first column in history
delete from history where session=XXX;

Also, here is a SQLite query that will give you the id of your last session:

select session from history order by -session limit 1;