How do I see what my most used linux command are?

Question

I would like to know which command I use the most on the command line. I would like to know so I can improve my use of the command line. If I know which command I use the most, I can then read more about them try and figure out better ways to use them.

I know history keeps a list of all the previous commands I typed. How would I process it to see a list of the top 10 or 20 most used commands.

Answer 1

I just saw this post on http://linux.byexamples.com/

Basically you use a simple one line awk script

history | awk '{CMD[$2]++;count++;}END { for (a in CMD)print CMD[a] " " CMD[a]/count*100 "% " a;}' | grep -v "./" | column -c3 -s " " -t | sort -nr | nl |  head -n10

A full explanation can be found at the link above.

Example of out put on my machine is:

 1  211  21.1%  ls
 2  189  18.9%  sudo
 3  58   5.8%   man
 4  52   5.2%   cd
 5  43   4.3%   ping
 6  40   4%     apropos
 7  34   3.4%   less
 8  22   2.2%   cat
 9  18   1.8%   which
10  18   1.8%   aspell

Answer 2

For a more general answer, enable "process accounting" on your system. You can get not just frequency of use, but aggregate CPU, memory, and I/O stats.

Answer 3

awk '{print $1}' ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

The awk command will print the first string from ~/.bash_history (not showing command options or arguments), then sort will order all lines alphabetically, then "uniq -c" will remove duplicated lines (your typed commands) and count them, and the last sort will order your commands by the count number returned by uniq.