Analyzing my 11k bash commands

history | wc informs me that I’ve typed exactly 11005 bash commands for the 278 days I’ve used Ubuntu (ls -lt /var/log/installer). However, I only expanded my history storage about 3 months ago, so I’ve probably lost out on 60% of the commands I’ve ever typed.

Still, I’m intrigued to investigate what commands have I been writing, so I set out to write some scripts to find out. I hypothesize the front runners to be cd, ls, and docker.

Top 10 commands executed

I wrote the following script:

import os
import sys
from collections import Counter
from itertools import dropwhile

if __name__ == " __main__":
    history_path = os.path.join("", os.path.expanduser("~"), ".bash_history")
    raw_history = open(history_path, 'r').read().splitlines()

    def nonEmpty(str: str) -> bool:
        return len(str) > 0

    def isSegmentEnvVar(segment: str):
        return '=' in segment

    def isSegmentDate(segment: str):
        return segment[0].isnumeric()

    # remove blank lines and dates and env varibales
    history = list(map(lambda row: ' '.join(
        dropwhile(lambda segment: isSegmentDate(segment) or isSegmentEnvVar(segment), row.split())), raw_history
        ))
    history = list(filter(nonEmpty, history))
    
    def top_n_command_name(n: int):
        command_names = map(lambda row: row.split(" ")[0], history)
        return Counter(command_names).most_common(n)
        
    print(top_n_command_name(10))

Results:

Command	Times Executed
cd	1522
ls	1446
npm	725
sudo	684
python3	588
git	513
cb-dev-kit	449
cb-cli	444
code	396
node	296

isSegmentEnvVar serves to remove the leading environment variables (e.g, ENV1=hello python3 driver.py).

isSegmentDate serves to remove the leading date information that might appear in a standard history entry.

Looks like I use a lot of node and python. Interesting, I would’ve thought that I’ve used more gcc than the other two.

10 most frequent commands with 2 keywords

    def top_n_k_keyword(n: int, k: int):
        keywords_list = [' '.join(row.split()[:k])
                          for row in history if len(row.split()) >= k]
        return Counter(keywords_list).most_common(n)
        
    print(top_n_k_keyword(10, 2))

Command	Times Executed
cd ..	324
code .	142
npm start	74
cd packages/server/	71
ls -R	44
cb-cli init	43
cd ../..	42
stack build	39
cb-dev-kit generate	38
git push	37

My full script with 3 more options

I designed 3 more options:

Shortest N commands
Longest N commands
N most frequent full commands

Run the script I linked above with no arguments to get some default output. Join my discord and let me know your results!