View Top 10 Most Used Commands

This section demonstrates how to view and analyze your command history to identify the most frequently used commands. Understanding your command usage can help optimize your workflow and recall common commands more efficiently.

# To see most used top 10 commands:
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

Understanding the Command

The provided bash command utilizes several standard Unix utilities to process the shell's history log. It pipes the output of the history command through awk to count command occurrences, then formats the output using column and sorts it numerically to display the top 10 most frequent commands along with their percentage of usage.

Benefits of Analyzing Command History

Analyzing your command history is a valuable practice for several reasons:

• Efficiency: Quickly identify and reuse frequently executed commands.
• Learning: Discover new or more efficient ways to perform tasks.
• Troubleshooting: Review past commands to understand system behavior or errors.
• Automation: Identify patterns that can be scripted for automation.

Related Shell Commands

For further exploration of shell command management, consider these related commands:

• history: Displays the command history list.
• !n: Executes the nth command from the history list.
• !!: Executes the last command.
• ctrl+r: Searches history interactively.