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Bash - Find Most Used Commands from History

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Find Most Used Commands from History

Overview

Sources:

One-liners to analyze your shell history and find your most frequently used commands.

Code

Basic Approaches

# method 1: handles piped commands
history | awk 'BEGIN {FS="[ \t]+|\\|"} {print $3}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n25
 
# method 2: simple approach
history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n25
 
# method 3: using associative array
history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -nr | head -n25

Command Statistics with Percentages

This function outputs line number, usage count, percentage, and command name:

shstats() {
  fc -l 1 | 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 -n25
}

Example output:

     1  469  12.4967%    cd
     2  232  6.18172%    ls
     3  197  5.24913%    docker
     4  175  4.66294%    poetry
     5  165  4.39648%    git
     6  124  3.30402%    dnscontrol
     7  112  2.98428%    gh
     8  109  2.90434%    pip
     9  95   2.53131%    brew
    10  87   2.31815%    mkdir

Details

  • The fc command is a built-in in Bash and Zsh that lists command history
  • fc -l 1 lists all commands from history entry 1 to the current
  • Results are sorted by frequency in descending order
  • head -n25 limits output to top 25 commands

Appendix

Note created on 2025-12-23 and last modified on 2025-12-23.

See Also

(c) No Clocks, LLC | 2025

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