Command popularity contest

This meme on popular commands seems pretty interesting. I’m normally not into this stuff, so here goes.

donnie@comet $ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s \n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head
61    ls
36    cd
35    sudo
33    nano
28    grep
24    e
23    qlist
15    man
15    git
14    cmake

Despite what you might expect, cmake has nothing to do with the build system. I had it set up before I’d ever heard of that cmake. To make sense of the above, you’ll need to see a couple of aliases.

donnie@comet $ type cmake
cmake is aliased to `PATH=”/usr/lib/ccache/bin:${PATH}” make’
donnie@comet $ type e
e is aliased to `pquery –raw -n -v –attr=license’

You can see that cmake is for when I want to compile stuff faster using ccache, and e is for searching through packages using pkgcore. Also, nearly every time I run sudo it’s because I’m emerging (installing) a package. The qlist command is for querying installed packages. In all, I spend a whole lot of time dealing with packages, which isn’t terribly surprising since I’m a distro packager.

You can also tell that I spend a lot of time reading documentation and searching for information from my use of man and grep.

Nowadays all my projects are maintained in git with the exception of a few Gentoo repositories. People have been writing about how great it is all over the place lately, so I’m not going to talk it up any more. When I make quick changes in these projects or any other files, I generally use the nano editor. For more involved sessions, I’m gravitating more and more toward emacs since starting to use it for its amazing XML editing mode called nxml-mode.

Please let me know whether you got a bit more value out of this meme post than some other ones because of the explanations that accompany it.