The top 10 Linux commands on BASH, and more ...

I recognize I am an almost 100% Ubuntu user, either in home or working. But even with all the resources ready to use in a Ubuntu Desktop, and the usability it provides, I am frquently in a CLI (Command Line Interface).

Thus, almost with a new version of Ubuntu, the 9.04, I am searching for all the stuff I have installed in my 8.10, because I will probably reinstall them. Of course, registering this here will help others, and myself.

But, in the warmth of the battle, I questioned myself: what was the command I used the most ? "Googling" the web, I found a post written by MySurface, that shows a soberb pipeline :

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

Ok, great and terrible, Godzilla is a tiny and cute gecko, and so on. I assure you, it will not bite you, nor melt your CPU. What it will really do is to show the top ten commands you've issued in BASH. Copy it from here and paste on your console. The result in my root account was:

1 73 14.6% ls
2 37 7.4% ufw
3 37 7.4% cd
4 25 5% iptables
5 23 4.6% aptitude
6 18 3.6% ifconfig
7 14 2.8% man
8 13 2.6% tail
9 13 2.6% du
10 11 2.2% host

That means ls is my most used command: it represents 14.6% of all: it was issued 73 times, in different conditions. This pipeline researched my command history and gave me this results.

I have made a simple modification to see the whole list:

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 |  less

In this case, press q to finish.

Conclusions
After that, I could see that:

• To have a better information, I should no use sudo for my administration tasks. Instead, I should login to root ($ sudo su -). Now every command issued by root account will be stored in its history. Guys on Ubuntu does warn that this may be harmful, that's why they provide a so complete sudo resource. So be advised: USE IT WITH CARE! :)
  
• Ubuntu default size for History File is 500 lines. I changed this to 1000 lines in ~root/.bashrc, adding the line HISTSIZE=1000 in this file.