That totally works, and I'd forgotten how to make it remove duplicates from the history, so that article was double good.
As for this:
I was recently reading about a case where part of the evidence appears to be a deleted bash history-file. From what I gather, the accused says that the removal was a clean-up job to remove inadvertently stored passwords rather than an attempt to hide nefarious activity.
Am I the only person who deletes the .bash_history file and, in order to avoid its re-creation, replaces it with a symlink to /dev/null? It's incredibly rare that I need command history from a previous session, and on those rare occasions it isn't a big deal to simply re-type the command.
I do the same with the folder that the flash player wants to store its data in. If you delete the folder, it will re-create it, but if you replace it with a symlink to /dev/null, it fails to re-create it, and so its data storage is permanently disabled.
I have no clue why so much software is designed to store history data forever. Once I close my web browser, I have no need for any history from when it was previously open. If I want to find web sites again, I either make a bookmark or I find it the same way I found it the first time. Aside from the back button and the "restore closed tabs" feature, I don't even use my web browser's history data from its current session, so why anyone would want it to store history data for years is beyond my understanding.