Shell Command Statistics

Behold! The top ten shell commands by frequency from my last 500 commands in Bash:

mreid@Fuji ~
$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10 
  91 ls
  72 more
  66 cd
  32 yap
  28 twl
  18 see
  14 vi
  13 cp
  12 diff
  11 mysql                                                                                              

The first three are unsurprising: peeking into directories, reading text files and moving around. (The command more is actually an alias to less - easier than retraining muscle memory).

The command yap starts up Yap prolog. The language used to write the majority of the code for my recently submitted PhD thesis. The other unusual one is twl, another alias, this time to ssh into the server that hosts this blog.

The commands see and vi are both text editors. I’m by no means a vi expert but I know enough to make it useful for quick edits of .htaccess files, jotting notes and editing small scripts.

The other editor command invokes SubEthaEdit, a solid Mac-only text editor with all the essentials (syntax highlighting, browser integration, etc) that also allows multiple people to edit a file simultaneously. They recently jacked up the price from $0 to US$35 so I switched to TextMate. If you’re going to pay money for an editor it may as well be a great one. This should mean the command mate will slip into the top ten in the near future.

Finally, the mysql entry belies my recent messing around with web applications and frameworks which require the MySQL database (e.g., ZenPhoto and Ruby on Rails).