Most Used Terminal Commands

I wanted to write an article about useful Unix commands, therefore, I wanted to see which commands I use most often for my daily work. To find these commands I needed to create a top 10 of the entries in my command history.

But how?

In the terminal, you can view commands you used in the past with the built-in shell command history. If you are using the zsh shell you have to add the parameter 1 to list the complete history:

# with zsh
history 1

# with bash
history

You will get a listing which looks something like this:

1  vi ~/.cntlm.conf
2  git diff HEAD^^..HEAD package.json
3  gd 0b54962 HEAD package.json
4  gd 0b54962^ 0b54962 package.json
5  git log -- package.json
6  git log package.json
7  docker run -d dockersamples/static-site
8  docker stop 0f6f36b15779
9  docker rm 0f6f36b15779
10  gcm 'Add welcome box for showcase'
…

But we are only interested in the actual command, not in the line number in the history file or the command parameters.

Therefore we pipe the output from history 1 to awk to filter out only the second column.

history 1 | awk '{print $2}'

Now we get the following output:

vi
git
gd
gd
git
git
docker
docker
docker
gcm

We can calculate the number of times a command appears in the history file by sorting the previous result and counting each appearance with uniq -c. That's why we have sorted the output before piping it to uniq. But since we only want to have the top 10, we also apply the command head -n 10.

This is the complete statement that will list your top 10 unix commands.

history 1 | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 10

The below is my top generate by the above statement:

1809 ag
1342 gcm
1138 gcmb
 480 git
 477 gco
 447 npm
 351 cd
 320 nr
 314 gbc
 305 vi

ag - The Silver Searcher. Like ack, but faster
gcm - alias for git ci -m
gcmb - alias for git bc
git - the stupid content tracker
gco - alias for git co (checkout)
npm - javascript package manager
cd - builtin zsh command to change directory
nr - alias for npm run
gbc - alias for git checkout -b (now I use gnb - git new branch more often)
vi - alias for VIM - Vi IMproved

The result is not very surprising, though. I mostly write with vi, search code with ag, and commit my work with git. All-day long :)

Bonus Tricks

If you prepend a command with a space, it will not appear in your command line history file. This is a great trick to know when you work with secrets or passwords.

Another great trick is to increase the commands that will be stored in your command history file. I have configured my shell to store the last 10000 typed commands. You can do this in your .bashrc or .zshrc file by adding a line with export HISTSIZE=10000.