Oh boy, this thread again. see: https://hackertimes.com/item?id=9044805

  user@somemachine.gs.com:~/ >svn export --username Aleynikov --password Hunter2 \
  --non-interactive svn://subversion.ZOMG.think.of.the.children.com/plundered/exportFile
  user@somemachine.gs.com:~/ >rm .bash_history

It's also not unheard of to encrypt files for transit, and for storage on untrusted remote machines. I'm sure someone else around here could show you a few dozen ways to pipe that through gpg, a few of which might also require a password to be used in the command, necessitating the deletion of .bash_history

You may criticize him for using encryption but what would you have him use, plaintext and ftp?