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Expertise and Behavior of Unix Command Line Users: an Exploratory Study

Authors:
Mohammad Gharehyazie
Bo Zhou
Iulian Neamtiu

Keywords: User behavior; user expertise; Unix; empirical study

Abstract:
Understanding users’ behavioral patterns and quantifying users’ expertise have a myriad applications, from predicting user actions and tailoring the environment to that specific user, to detecting masquerade attacks and assessing learning outcomes. Toward this end, we have conducted a study on three Unix command datasets, totaling 263 users and more than 1 million commands. We first introduce the notions of command expertise, command line expertise, and command category. Next, we use these metrics, combined with other attributes to define and quantify several user expertise metrics, e.g., category breadth, command line expertise. Our study has revealed many Unix commands characteristics, e.g., Unix command can be grouped into 25 categories; file management is the most common activity; the most commonly used commands are two-characters long. Our study has also revealed many insights into user expertise and behavior, such as: command line length is not an indicator of user expertise; users activity is highest on Monday and decreases every day through Saturday, picking up on Sunday; peak command usage hours are 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.; development activities happen mostly in the afternoon.

Pages: 315 to 322

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2016

Publication date: April 24, 2016

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4138

ISBN: 978-1-61208-468-8

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from April 24, 2016 to April 28, 2016