Sometimes while working on the terminal or commandline as you know it, the history becomes clogged with simple common commands like ls -al and you want to remove X number of lines to keep your history compact and relevant.  Here’s a simple command that works:

for i in {1..total_count}; do history -d start_from; done

This deletes a total of total_count  amount of history starting from line number start_from in your history.   Make your Shell clean again!

Usage:

for i in {1..40}; do history -d 1000; done

Enjoy.