I am one of the dozens. If only I was able to locate a history-related technology job. It seems like you need to be in Washington DC to find anything like that.
In the Netherlands, where I live, there is the International Institute of Social History, which does a lot of data processing, and has programmers as employees. As a student I screw up an interview very badly, by not showing up. I still regret it after 20 years. How stupid can a youngster be. On the other hand I don't have any complaints about my work and pay and benefits at the jobs I have had since then, which probably would have been very different had I gone the historyprogrammer route.
But I quit the academic path due to economic reasons, i.e bad pay, and needing to apply to grants. I think unless you're explicitly acknowledged as an engineer/programmer it's hard to get anything remotely competitive.
Sounds like something that should be optional in the shell itself, scrub command before writing to history.
Naive non-programmers version: use a hash table to censor all substrings of a given length range that match against it ... sounds like it might be expensive (in compute time), also you have to keep a list of those hashes around.
Bet it's been wontfix-ed in at least one major shell?
See the HISTCONTROL environment variable in bash (and maybe something similar in other shells):
HISTCONTROL
A colon-separated list of values controlling how commands are
saved on the history list. If the list of values includes
"ignorespace", lines which begin with a space character are not
saved in the history list.
[...]
This is convenient because any time you don't want a command saved in history, just start it with a leading space.
Also look at HISTIGNORE for finer grained control.
FWIW, my understanding of sqlite is that it allows atomic operations against the same DB, even if there are different clients... so I would guess at worst the clobbering is minimal. I could be wrong, though.
