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

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.

Answer 3

You can use the hash command in your terminal, which keeps a hash entry of every command that you use along with the number of hits and based on the hits you can sort them out and process.

Check this article for more information.

Answer 4

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 5

The scripts in the other answers only count the first command executed in each command line; they do not include commands executed after pipes (i.e. ' | '). For example, if this line itself was in your bash history:

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

then in the returned summary of most-executed commands, 'sort' and 'uniq' and the second 'sort' would not be included, as they weren't the first token in the line.

Building on the answer from nelaar, it suffices to first split the lines in your bash history on every pipe:

sed 's/|/\n/g' ~/.bash_history | awk '{CMD[$1]++;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

Answer 6

A fun addition would be a bar chart of the counts:

history | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f3 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail | perl -lane 'print $F[1], "\t", $F[0], " ", "▄" x ($F[0] / 12)'

Output:

man     226 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
cat     230 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
rm      235 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
ls      240 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
aura    273 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
mv      362 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
sudo    534 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
vi      611 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
git     693 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
cd      754 ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄

Long commands will offset the spacing.

Answer 7

Use $ 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 to get a list of your top 10 commands.

Example:

 1  272  27.2%  svn
 2  227  22.7%  cd
 3  159  15.9%  sudo
 4  57   5.7%   ll
 5  52   5.2%   mc
 6  32   3.2%   rm
 7  23   2.3%   mkdir
 8  19   1.9%   exit
 9  13   1.3%   subl
10  13   1.3%   find

Answer 8

You can fashion the above awk answer from @nelaar into a nice bash script:

#!/bin/bash
HISTFILE=~/.bash_history
set -o history
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

Answer 9

Well this is a modified version of the command "Неделчо Христов" copied and pasted here.... if you have secured or date stamped your bash history then you will have a faulted output

This will do you better using this:

awk '{CMD[$1]++;count++;}END { for (a in CMD)print CMD[a] " " CMD[a]/count*100 "% " a;}' .bash_history | grep -v "#" | sort -nr | nl | column -c3 -s " " -t | head -n 20

Answer 10

If you're using Oh My Zsh! this feature is already there. Just type

zsh_stats

To get a list of the top 20 commands and how many times they have been run.

Source: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/wiki/Cheatsheet

Answer 11

If you wanna see the commands with arguments, you can try this:

history | awk '{$1="";CMD[$0]++;count++;}END { for (a in CMD)print CMD[a] " " CMD[a]/count*100 "% " a;}' | sort -nr | nl |  head -n10

➜ history | awk '{$1="";CMD[$0]++;count++;}END { for (a in CMD)print CMD[a] " " CMD[a]/count*100 "% " a;}' | sort -nr | nl |  head -n10
     1  689 12.2992%  l
     2  406 7.24741%  cd ..
     3  292 5.21242%  ssh dakv.aka.xx
     4  239 4.26633%  gs
     5  230 4.10568%  cr
     6  186 3.32024%  ls
     7  183 3.26669%  bbc
     8  159 2.83827%  gc --amend
     9  153 2.73117%  bb
    10  106 1.89218%  cd Service