Which command do I use the most?

After waking to a ringing phone, I was attempting to fall back asleep. As I drifted, I wondered which command I used the most? I thought it a neat exercise, so I found out.

As I type this, I suspect it is ls. Which is second and third should be interesting.

I gathered up .zsh_history and .bash_history files from 5 different machines I work on a fair bit and put them in a pile, erm, directory.

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$ cat bash_history? < big_bash_history
$ wc -l big_bash_history
2897 big_bash_history
$ sed -e 's/^.*;//g' zsh_history? <big_zsh_history
$ wc -l big_zsh_history
31188 big_zsh_history

Wow! 35 thousand commands. Wait… There’s a snafu in there. SUDO. Hmm….

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$ awk '{print $1}' big_zsh_history|grep sudo |wc -l
2045
$ awk '{print $1}' big_bash_history|grep sudo |wc -l
887

Okay. I’ve got some numbers around that…Let’s see about stripping those and get the underlying command.

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$ sed -r -e '/sudo -i/d' -e 's/sudo //g' big_bash_history big_zsh_history|awk '{print $1}'|while read CMD;do basename "$CMD"; done |sort |uniq -c |sort -rn |head -20
   4571 cd
   3845 ls
   2884 vi
   2436 git
   1719 ssh
   1195 cat
   1032 grep
    928 rm
    797 ansible-playbook
    659 mv
    619 pass
    619 cp
    443 python
    438 scp
    394 apt-get
    373 salt
    372 mkdir
    339 more
    297 find
    291 done

Okay. No surprises in the top five. ansible-playbook surprised me. Didn’t realize I entered that so much. There were more points of interest after the first twenty, but I won’t post those.

Interesting done showed up in the top twenty. Thinking about this, it makes sense, as the first command is usually input to while, ie:

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ls | while read FILE; do echo $FILE; done

No if or fi in the top twenty. How about that.

Actually, thinking about this more, there are probably many more missing commands that were piped into another or, say rm used in an exec for find.