shell commands

I saw this blog post by Debian’s Florian Ragwitz, and ran my own list of most commonly used shell commands. Here they are…

    history |awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r | head -15
        627 git
        266 vim
         98 cd
         76 grep
         69 ls
         63 gitk
         60 ssh
         51 sudo
         47 vv
         47 apt-cache
         40 cat
         34 make
         33 patch
         30 rm
         25 man

I use git, gitk, vim, and make constantly for work. git diff will sometimes get piped into a file and later restored using patch. I have several systems that I ssh to. sudo usually precedes things like apt-get install and apt-get upgrade… that’s where apt-cache came from.

The one thing that stands out is vv. vv is a pager for shell command output based on vim and some bash scripting. Checkout the vv function in my bashrc. It lets me run things like

    vv git diff file 
    vv git log origin..HEAD

which equate to

    git diff file | vim -R -
    git log origin..HEAD | vim -R -

vv is an evolution of my v command prefix. While vv will always go into the vim pager, v will only direct text into the pager if it’s more then what would fit on the screen. See the least function which is used to decide when to go to a pager.