Having just read Daniel Greenfeld's post, I tried out the command he uses to get a history of his most-used shell commands. The results were interesting enough that I thought I may as well post mine, with annotations as he has. I'm doing the top 11, not the top 20, though.

(In case it's not clear, in every line anything after # is an annotation)

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn |head -n 11
169 git          # I spend *lots* of time committing code, it seems
124 ./manage.py  # Courtesy of Esplorio being Django-driven
35 ls            # Yep, I don't always remember what's in which directory
31 cd            # Moving around my filesystem, for the win
16 ln            # OK so I've done a bunch of copying things around and symlinking lately,
                 #     but I'm surprised at how much! 
16 exit          # I was a little surprised by this, but I tend to work with half a dozen
                 #     shell tabs at once, so I guess closing them all down adds up?
15 sed           # The old-school find-and-replace tool ;-)
9 history        # This is entirely from messing around with the sample command above,
                 #     and shouldn't really count -- so I've done the top 11, not 10
9 ack            # If you don't use ack, you really should, it's a great text-search tool
7 workon         # Surprise, surprise, I'm a Python developer who uses virtualenvwrapper
7 ssh            # Setting up and debugging remote servers takes longer than you'd think

If you spend much (any) time at the command line, why not try this out? You might be surprised by the results (I was certainly a bit surprised by how often I seem to use exit!), and it might make for an interesting blog post!

comments