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Comment by jmiserez | Hacker News Reader

Interesting writeup. I loath setting environment variables on long running terminal sessions exactly because it’s not obvious once they’re set.

I prefer to use a subshell for the command and set the environment variable each time:

$ ( export FOO=bar; my_cmd )

Or just:

env FOO=bar my_cmd

Or just:

FOO=bar my_cmd

Or just:

     FOO=bar my_cmd

That's the same but with a leading space, to prevent 'bar' from showing up in your histfile.

On bash, this assumes that $HISTCONTROL is set to ignoreboth [0]. This is in the default ~/.bashrc on Ubuntu, but I can't speak about other distros.

I don't use zsh, but I believe the equivalent is $HIST_IGNORE_SPACE [1].