Find Your Most Used Terminal Commands (Bash, Fish, Zsh)

If you are the kind of Linux user that spends a lot of time in a terminal, you have probably asked yourself, "What are the commands that I run the most?" Well, using the "history" command and a few of the GNU core utilities, we can get a list of our most used commands and how many times we've run them.

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[hiii]

If you're an arch user you don't need to do any of this as you already know your most used command is neofetch

[HungrigerWolf]

Most used command of an Arch user: Neofetch.
Closely followed by "Sudo Pacman -Syu"


I use Arch btw.

[mitchell]

Awesome! I love your videos on different terminal tools and utilities

[ArniesTech]

TheLinuxCast just posted the most dangerous commands, DT now posts the most frequently used ones 💪😎

[nullq]

Congratulations man! You are 201k! I love your videos and love your effort for FOSS.

[mohitkumar-jvbx]

Saw your awk video a day or two back. And today got to see its practical use. Thanks DT for all the great videos 🙏

[modrobert]

One liners through pipe is one of the reasons I use Linux, thanks for this one.

[theodorealenas]

I got inspired and used these tools.
Now I'm using a single file for storing more than one number in it. I mean... The tools helped!

Related idea: automatic --help.

You take an executable you've written, which can take arguments, and you add a command to it, that can scan it and present those arguments, as help instructions. If the lines that define arguments have comments, those are presented too. I did it and it was a blast!

Thank you for presenting technology like this luxurious cockpit. You defined what's on my mind many times. Unlike teachers. I'm sorry I'm annoying sometimes.

[brickviking]

Here's a quick snapshot for mine out of 245892 commands: 53599 cd, 43869 ls, 10594 vim, 8001 sudo; 6838 git, 4880 locate, ... 1799 find, ... .
I worked out mostly the same command sequence as you, but I just did this instead:
cat all_bash_history | sed -e '/ \t/d' |cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rh | head -n 50
It's enlightening. The reason for the sed in there is to get rid of the " cd "`printf "%b that seems to have something to do with midnight commander.

[petepf]

You forgot to count commands that are "piped" into using output of other commands?

[SupaShang]

Another handy one I pinched from Bugswriter is a history search which uses fuzzy finder and can copy the selected command into the clipboard for later use:

alias h="history | cut -c 8- | sort -u | fzf +m -e | tr -d '\\n' | xclip -selection c"

I use this one all the time.

[kr]

very useful when considering which commands to alias. Thank you!

[andreasbaumann]

171 ls
152 cd
82 ssh
79 mutt
45 exit
28 git
27 e
20 sudo
20 rm

e being an alias to joe (using tcsh)

[littlepeon]

If you don't cut off the arguments, you can see exactly what commands you repeat often, and then you can create an alias for that specific command. I run "history | cut -f 7- -d " " | sort | uniq -c | sort | tail -20" once a week to find my most used commands with their arguments and create aliases off that list.

[anon_y_mousse]

I always use spaces around pipe characters so I can just do `awk '{ print $2; }'. I just checked and my top three are `cd`, `lrt` and `exit`. With `lrt` being my shell function to acquire a list of reverse time sorted files and display only the N most recent, where the default N is 10. Of course I also have bare `ls` and my alias of `ll` in that list too which edges out `cd` even if you add in number 18 on the list, the alias `..`. Since it counts aliases, `cls` is in the top 20 as well. I guess I don't use `...` or `....` or as much as `..`, but those are handy aliases to have for changing down multiple directories. Of course it's been a slow week, so make and gcc didn't even make the top 20, although I did find `...` when I expanded to 50.

[chrissaltmarsh]

Very similar with tcsh - which I use for historical reasons. Slight awk change.
Top of my list is'vi', an alias for neovim, where I spend most of my work time.

[piotrtrzcinski]

On eshell: maybe it's POSIX why it works

[TurntableTV]

Hey DT, I don't know if you're gonna read this comment or not but when you do find the time... please review the BigLinux distro. I wanna hear your thoughts on this one. Thank you!

[MichaelDeBusk]

I have HISTTIMEFORMAT set to '"%FT%T: " so my history commands look like "21476 2022-09-28T14:47:08: history". I use cut instead of awk:

history | cut -b 29- | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20

[josipbroztito]

Waow goood video derek. Thumbs up from