command line personas

Stephen ran a cool line of command line goodness to crunch out a list of the most commonly run commands he runs in Terminal.

The code he ran is:

% history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head

Hey, that's pretty cool. Crunches through the shell history, spits out a list of commands, groups them by uniqueness and sorts them by number of occurrences.

I ran it on the 3 systems I use most often:

  84 ssh
  80 ls
  65 cd
  50 exit
  33 sudo
  19 rm
  16 mate
  11 httrack
  10 more
   9 curl

    287 ls
    227 cd
     61 curl
     51 rm
     50 tar
     48 cp
     43 emacs
     42 pci
     24 more
     24 exit

    317 ls
    215 cd
    120 rm
     47 nano
     47 mv
     36 curl
     33 more
     27 exit
     25 unzip
     20 cp

On my Desktop, I'm mostly hopping off to other systems via SSH, or editing config stuff (sudo and mate - the command line interface for TextMate). On webapps3, I'm administering a bunch of Drupal sites, so there's a lot of grabbing stuff via wget and curl, dealing with tarballs, and editing config files. On darcynorman.net I'm mostly updating WordPress, moving files around, and (before WP 2.5) updating plugins and themes.

I'm more than a little surprised that man didn't show up in the top 10 list on any of these systems...

It's kind of interesting, to me at least, how each system I use has a different fingerprint of activity.