Shell history 04.20.2008

There’s a meme spreading about your command line history. Well, why not? Here’s mine:

$ history | awk ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head

79 ssh
43 ls
43 clear
35 hg
33 cd
31 top
20 time
16 screen
15 scp
15 git

For the curious:

  • ssh is at the top of the list due to the fact that my current project for work can only be done on a remote box. I’m sure that if I ran a history there, svn and vim, along with less, would be at the top of the list.

  • clear because I am near-neurotic about clearing my terminal screen. Nothing makes my eyes cross faster than a huge amount of jumbly lines with the content I care about mixed in somewhere.

  • screen is something I couldn’t live without. It’s essential to my command-line workflow.

  • hg and git are VCS software I use. I use Mercurial more, but I’ve been experimenting with git in recent weeks.

  • time because I use time cat as my time tracking system at work. When I start a task, I put time cat in a new screen session. When I finish the task, I control-C out of time cat and get the amount of time it took.