a journal of interesting technical ideas . . . a journal of interesting technical ideas . . .
I’ve seen some articles recently on “Linux commands frequently used by admins” or “15 commonly used Linux commands”, which got me thinking . . . what commands do I use most frequently?
history shows us a list of recent commands starting with a sequence number (example below). But I just want the command!
> brent@MintyTwenty:__~$ history__
1 mkdir git
2 cd git
3 git clone https://github.com/brentstewart/Mint-install.git
. . .
Piping this output into awk allows me to filter this down to the first word. Awk can pull a field out; in this case the sequence number is field 1 and the command is field 2.
> brent@MintyTwenty:~$ __history | awk '{print $2}'__
mkdir
cd
git
Getting closer! I want a frequence count of which commands are used, so let’s pipe this to uniq -c.
> brent@MintyTwenty:~$ __history | awk '{print $2}' | uniq -c__
1 mkdir
1 cd
1 git
3 sudo
1 exit
1 git
1 ls
1 cd
1 git
1 cd
1 ls
Notice that it’s showing cd counted in multiple groups. I think this is because of the way uniq is grouping, so let’s help it out by piping that output to sort before asking uniq to group and count.
brent@MintyTwenty:~$ __history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c__
1 "
3 alias
4 awk
4 ./basic.sh
1 cat
31 cd
3 chmod
. . .
At this point it is easy to find that my top commands are: