Miskatonic University Press

Commands I use

code4lib unix

Inspired by Eugene Wallingford’s Commands I Use, which was in turn inspired by Greg Wilson’s Commands I Use, here are the commands I use the most, starting I don’t know when:

history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | more
  • ll (about 2400 times; this is my alias for ls -l)
  • cd (about 2000 times)
  • rm (about 600 times)
  • l (my alias for ls)
  • ssh
  • x (alias for xdg-open; I use it to open PDFs or Word files in the right viewer)
  • ipl (alias for get_iplayer, to get BBC radio shows)
  • mv
  • git (most of my Git commands are done inside Emacs)
  • more (aliased to less)
  • cp
  • gp (alias for gPodder, my podcast client)
  • make
  • vlc
  • mkdir
  • sudo
  • eog (the default Ubuntu image viewer)
  • nord (a wrapper I wrote around nordvpn from NordVPN)
  • emacs (I restart Emacs rarely; it’s always running)
  • ncdu (ncurses disk usage tool)
  • get (for easy copying of files from other machines; equals rsync --archive --progress --human-readable "$@" .)
  • file
  • scp
  • grep

I do a fair bit of file moving and renaming inside Emacs, but I don’t like the Emacs shells so command line stuff I do in a regular terminal window.