Common Commands

Someone asked me today: "What are some common Linux commands that I should know to get around the OS" and I decided to just give them what I used. Between myself and a fellow engineer, we invented the following lists from our environments (for better or for worse):

Parse of my most used commands & pipes currently in my history, truncated for brevity.

> history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -h | tail -n 30  
     28 python
     28 python3
     31 find
     32 .
     39 cp
     49 grep
     53 pip
     54 mv
     58 aws
     63 dig
     76 ans
     86 rm
     99 make
    101 echo
    106 curl
    107 mkdir
    114 code
    120 ansible-playbook
    164 docker-compose
    166 sudo
    190 vim
    191 terraform
    245 go
    270 cat
    287 ssh
    310 kubectl
    586 docker
   1193 cd
   1435 ls
   1796 git

> history | grep \| | tr "|" "\n" | cut -f 2- -d ' ' | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -h | tail -n 20
      6 uniq
      7 less
     10 unzip
     16 kubectl
     18 xargs
     19 echo
     25 sed
     31 tail
     34 cut
     44 tr
     45 base64
     46 sort
     60 jq
     65 head
     90 awk
    273 grep

A fellow engineer's equivalent, parsed similarly

$ history | awk '{print $5}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -h | tail -n 30
     29 mv
     32 else
     36 history
     39 ip
     39 ls
     40 apt
     46 exit
     46 sed
     49 helm
     52 rm
     58 man
     76 git
     77 watch
     80 tmux
     83 ~/python-venv/ansible/bin/ansible
     83 start_agent
     88 awk
     95 sudo
    105 cat
    118 jq
    125 for
    155 grep
    157 ssh
    189 cd
    198 echo
    272 ll
    329 less
    753 kubectl
    762 bash
    976 vim

$ history | grep \| | tr "|" "\n" | grep -Pv '^\s+\d+' | cut -f 2- -d ' ' | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -h | tail -n 20
     16 head
     21
     35 tr
     39 bc
     54 wc
     60 +
     66 jq
     79 tail
    124 awk
    126 sed
    146 sort
    216 less
    263 grep

Some key takeaways:
These aren't all the commands, obviously; these are just the most frequent tools my friend and I happen to reach for. May they someday be of use to someone that needs to whittle down their study or maybe pick up a new tool.

Look forward to a rundown of what these commands actually do in the near future.