this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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Programmer Humor

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[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 20 points 1 day ago (2 children)

history | grep -E '(sed|grep|awk|perl)' | wc -l 107

Dang. That's out of 1000. I need to up my game. Also three of those seds are part of something with a -basedir and don't count.

So yeah, about 10% of my commands are iterating shell pipe things for poops and giggles, I guess.

... and this got me going down the rabbit hole of writing a filter for my history to pull out the first command on the line. This is non-trivial because of potential preceding variable assignments. Most used commands are currently apt and man and ls. I think apt is a Spiders Georg situation because the system is fairly fresh and I keep finding things that I haven't installed yet. Also I went through a patch of trying to parse its output.

... oh, er... unga bunga.

[–] flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

I just use nushell’s builtins instead of wrangling with IFS and bash idiosyncrasies. It's been years since I've corrupted data by parsing text wrong.

But even if someone doesn't want that: apart from using it in legacy scripts, grep is just a strictly less useful ripgrep these days, no?

[–] TwilightKiddy@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago 
$ history | grep -E '(sed|grep|awk|perl)' | wc -l
50
$ history | wc -l
500

Checks out perfectly.