Answer by user2711286 for How to delete history of last 10 commands in shell?

the history -d arg takes a range and $HISTCMD is the max number in the history.

This function works to remove the last n entries from history (just pass in the number of history commands to remove like, eg rmhist 5) :

$ rmhist()  { history -d $(($HISTCMD - $1))-$HISTCMD ;}

Or.. Go fancy with an arg like this to remove from a point in history (inclusive) or last 'n' commands:

rmhist() {   case $1 in     --from|from) local start=$2; ;;     --last|last) local start=$(($HISTCMD - $2)) ;;     *) echo "Try rmhist --from # or rmhist --last n "; return ;;   esac;   history -d ${start}-${HISTCMD}}

The result looks something like this:

 5778  ls /etc 5779  ls /tmp 5780  ls /dev 5781  ll 5782  cd /tmp 5783  cd 5784  history(base) ~ $ rmhist --last 3(base) ~ $ history 5 5778  ls /etc 5779  ls /tmp 5780  ls /dev 5781  ll 5782  history 5(base) ~ $ rmhist --from 5780(base) ~ $ history 5 5776  history 10 5777  ls 5778  ls /etc 5779  ls /tmp 5780  history 5