This simple one-liner will print a list of your most executed shell commands. This is very useful for keeping track of the Linux utilities and scripts that a user executes most often.
jason@Yog-Sothoth » ~ » $ 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
1 68 13.6% sudo
2 44 8.8% ls
3 31 6.2% for
4 30 6% cd
5 27 5.4% cowsay
6 26 5.2% tr
7 25 5% cat
8 24 4.8% grep
9 21 4.2% mc
10 14 2.8% date
Get a bar chart of the most executed commands on your system.
jason@Yog-Sothoth » ~ » $ history | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f3 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail | perl -lane 'print $F[1], "\t", $F[0], " ", "▄" x ($F[0] / 12)' date 14 ▄ mc 21 ▄ grep 24 ▄▄ cat 25 ▄▄ tr 26 ▄▄ cowsay 27 ▄▄ cd 29 ▄▄ for 31 ▄▄ ls 44 ▄▄▄ sudo 66 ▄▄▄▄▄
This is yet another solution to list commands that the user has executed most often.
jason@Yog-Sothoth » ~ » $ awk '{CMD[$1]++;count++;}END { for (a in CMD)print CMD[a] " " CMD[a]/count*100 "% " a;}' .bash_history | grep -v "#" | sort -nr | nl | column -c3 -s " " -t | head -n 20
1 68 13.6% sudo
2 44 8.8% ls
3 31 6.2% for
4 30 6% cd
5 27 5.4% cowsay
6 26 5.2% tr
7 25 5% cat
8 24 4.8% grep
9 21 4.2% mc
10 14 2.8% date
11 12 2.4% time
12 12 2.4% man
13 11 2.2% utmpdump
14 9 1.8% shuf
15 9 1.8% ps
16 9 1.8% aterm
17 7 1.4% dmesg
18 7 1.4% dconf
19 6 1.2% ssh
20 6 1.2% (echo
This is another example, this lists the most-run Linux commands and how often each was run.
jason@Yog-Sothoth » ~ » $ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
66 sudo
40 ls
38 cat
31 for
31 cd
26 tr
23 mc
22 date
19 ps
12 time
This could be very useful to know commands are the most used on your Linux machine. This would give a user a good picture of how they use their system day to day.
Add date stamps to each entry that is output by the history command.
Run these commands to add a date stamp to commands listed by the history command. This is very useful to know exactly when a command was run.
echo 'export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T "' >> ~/.bashrc source ~/.bashrc |
Then run the history command, and the timestamps will appear before each entry.
jason@jason-Lenovo-H50-55:~$ history | tail -n 25 1061 20/07/18 21:36:47 ./start.sh &exit 1062 20/07/18 21:36:47 sudo apt update 1063 20/07/18 21:36:47 sudo apt upgrade 1064 20/07/18 21:36:47 cd Steam/steamapps/common/Arma\ 3\ Server/ 1065 20/07/18 21:36:47 ls 1066 20/07/18 21:36:47 exit 1067 20/07/18 13:02:24 env 1068 20/07/18 13:02:37 export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T " 1069 20/07/18 13:02:40 env 1070 20/07/18 13:02:44 ps ax 1071 20/07/18 13:02:55 cat .bash_history 1072 20/07/18 13:03:06 bash 1073 20/07/18 13:03:13 cd Documents/ 1074 20/07/18 13:03:14 ls 1075 20/07/18 13:03:18 ls -hula 1076 20/07/18 13:03:26 cat ~/.bash_history 1077 20/07/18 13:03:42 cat ~/.bash_history | head -n 20 1078 20/07/18 13:03:53 cat ~/.bash_history | tail -n 20 1079 20/07/18 13:07:40 echo 'export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%d/%m/%y %T "' >> ~/.bashrc 1080 20/07/18 13:07:41 source ~/.bashrc 1081 20/07/18 13:07:49 ps ax 1082 20/07/18 13:07:51 ps axhu 1083 20/07/18 13:07:56 cat ~/.bash_history | tail -n 20 1084 20/07/18 21:36:55 history 1085 20/07/18 21:38:41 history | tail -n 25 |
This could be a very useful tip.