For what it's worth, here is a tally of the commands I ran during a recent week. It was generated with the command
history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n
The first column is how many times I invoked the command; the second
column is the name of the command. (I've added a note in parentheses
after a couple commands because they are obscure or don't come with Unix.)
The commands are listed most-frequently-used first, but the data is very noisy - your milage may vary.
To use this list, start at the top, look up each command in
your Unix system's man pages, get an idea of what the command
is for and how to use it, and try it out a bit yourself.
Work down the list at your own pace, as time permits.
Hint: it's often useful to first look at
a very primitive Unix system's documentation before looking at
modern documentation,
as the primitive Unix man pages are simpler and easier to read, and sometimes give a better idea of the zen of the command.
543 ls
438 cd
349 vi
170 grep
105 more
101 rm
80 mv
77 egrep
73 ssh (see www.openssh.com)
67 find
58 ps
56 make
54 fg (see sh)
49 p4 (see www.perforce.com)
43 cat
41 man
34 cp
33 su
33 sh
30 pwd
28 perl (see www.perl.com)
27 jobs (see sh)
24 wget (see www.gnu.org/software/wget/)
24 co (see rcs)
23 mkdir
23 lynx (see lynx.browser.org)
19 tar
18 strace
14 rpm (see www.rpm.org)
14 route
14 ci (see rcs)
13 tail
13 rmdir
11 . script (see sh)
10 nslookup
10 kill
10 history (see sh)
10 exit (see sh)
9 scp (see www.openssh.com)
9 rlog (see rcs)
8 for (see sh)
8 expand
8 echo
8 date
7 wc
7 VAR=val cmd (see sh)
7 strings
7 diff
6 which
6 ping
6 java
6 ftp
6 du
5 rcsdiff (see rcs)
5 locate
4 zcat
4 traceroute
4 top
4 tidy (see web3.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/)
4 telnet
4 ./configure (see sources.redhat.com/autobook)
4 lpr
4 done (see sh)
4 bg (see rcs)
3 suspend (see sh)
3 javac
3 file
3 df
3 fgrep
3 chmod
2 whois
2 startx
2 reset
2 gdb
2 gcc
1 printenv
1 ln
1 javadoc
1 head
1 nm
1 uniq
1 sort
1 awk