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I've answered 1) and 3) below.

Thanks for the link in 5)! That's really useful.

I really like the two visualizations you've made -- I'll definitely look into incorporating some of those ideas when I have time.


I've spent quite some time looking at those histograms, but I haven't found a good way to display it usefully yet.

The most popular commands are 'git', 'ls', and 'cd', and the table of most used commands is too long to be able to easily digest. Any suggestions would be appreciated, though!


It'd be awesome to see a dump of the data so that we can examine it on our own - many people may think of ways to use it that you haven't, or draw different conclusions from it. :D


Yeah! This is something that I'm interested in, but there are a bunch of privacy issues with a raw data dump (references to specific files/URLs and possibly passwords), and I haven't gotten around to making sure it's safe yet.

(note: I haven't actually seen any passwords, but that doesn't mean there aren't any)


Oh, that totally skipped my mind. Maybe run something to recognize URLs (replace with $URL, or some kind of placeholder), and then try to obfuscate filenames and the like in a similar way? By normalizing the data like this, you could get much better results with regards to command line switches and the like.


Thanks for caring about the privacy issues.

I would have to guess that the first "word" with the command only is clean? Have you seen any evidence to the contrary? That data set alone would tell an interesting story.


Someone pointed out to me the 'ls' typo constellation =D

http://jvns.ca/projects/unix-command-survey/graph.html?cente...



good question! The issue is that everyone uses git, so it's not correlated with any other commands.


do you know about the organization Software Carpentry? http://software-carpentry.org/

They work on teaching scientists to be better at software, and are always looking for people to do workshops


Thanks very much! As of 2:14pm, it's using your new version for greater pipe accuracy =)


Yup, this oversight is officially embarrassing.


Excellent point. I'm definitely going to put that caveat at the beginning of any analysis I post. (and thanks to ctrl_freak for posting an alternative!)


Yes! I don't want to know anybody's secrets. I won't be publishing the raw data for this reason, in case anything like this gets through by accident.


Huh, I didn't know that. What command gives the entire history on OS X, then?


history shows the full .bash_history, but by default HISTFILESIZE is 500 so it only stores 500 entries.


I ran this in Mac OS without a hitch, gave 100. I use zsh, maybe the default shell doesn't?


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