Most Used CLI commands in 2024

Inspired by Chris DeLuca’s post about his most used command line commands, I did a little digging into my shell history and crunched some numbers.

While checking the ZSH history of my desktop, I noticed that it only contained entries starting in May 1, 2024. It seems I had deleted the history file before that for unknown reasons or it’s related to the set history size, but at least this will give some insight.

What’s in my ZSH history

Before we dive into anything else, let’s take a look at our shell history. By exploring its contents, we can get a better idea of what we’re working with:

: 1735587928:0;vim config.toml
: 1735588935:0;git add .
: 1735588948:0;git commit -m'no hardcoded texts in templates'
: 1735588952:0;git push origin main

There is some useful information in there. We’ve got the Epoch, which tells us when each command was executed, the exit status, and the actual commands themselves.

I tweaked the copy of the .zhistory file to include only the commands and their parameters, keeping only those that were in 2024.

Identifying the Top 10 Most Used Commands

The numbers were extracted roughly as follows:

cat history-crop | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 10

This resulted in the following statistics

   1180 git
   1012 cd
    678 vim
    535 mv
    425 cp
    353 rm
    262 mkdir
    255 cat
    247 ll
    128 sudo

vim is actually an alias for nvim.

Most used Git commands

While I was at it, I also did a quick check of the most commonly used git commands by slightly tweaking the awk command. The important thing is that you only need to filter out lines that start with the git command.

cat history-crop | awk '$1 == "git" {print $1 " " $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

This resulted in the following statistics

    500 git commit
    212 git add
    111 git checkout
     51 git diff
     48 git mv
     48 git clone
     32 git log
     26 git push
     22 git tag
     19 git rm

The Takeaways

I was actually expecting slightly higher numbers, especially in regards to the git and nvim command, as I used those a lot, but it seems that the culprit for not meeting expectations is the history file size limits.

ZSH’s default history file size is limited to 10,000 lines by default, and will truncate the history to this length by deduplicating entries and removing old data.

This can be prevented by changing the size limits:

export HISTSIZE=1000000000
export SAVEHIST=$HISTSIZE
setopt EXTENDED_HISTORY

But the history size limit was not the only issue that led to lower numbers. sudo is a good example of a too-low number, because I use it regularly to update the system, but it is masked by an alias.

alias dnfu='sudo dnf update'

Finally, the piped command I used to extract the numbers does not respect piped commands. This means that if you chain greps or any other command by a pipe, it will only count the first command.

Last but not least, while tinkering with this, I stumbled upon a atuin that replaces your shell history with a SQLite database, providing additional context for your commands. Also, while looking for the reason behind the numbers, I found a tool called ZSH History Analysis. Maybe I will give them both a try for the 2025 most used CLI commands edition.