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2

Say I have a file which contains:

A
A
A
B
CC

I want to have the output like this:

A 3
B 1
CC 1
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2 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

I figured it out; one of uniq's options is -c, for "prefix lines by the number of occurrences":

$ uniq -c
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1  
Note that puts the numbers first. If you were fussy about the order, you could do: uniq -c filename.txt | sed 's/[^0-9]*\\([0-9]\+\\) \\(.*\\)/\2 \1/' – frabjous Jan 7 '11 at 3:28
6  
Also note that it only counts adjacent repeat lines. A common idiom is sort | uniq – Steven D Jan 7 '11 at 3:54
3  
uniq also puts the count in front of the datum. The original question would actually need something like this: sort filename | uniq -c | awk '{print $2, $1}' – Bruce Ediger Jan 7 '11 at 13:25
up vote 6 down vote

I just came here with a similar problem. From this, I managed to put together a slightly more advanced command, which I hope is useful for others.

As Steven D said in the comments above uniq only counts adjacent repeat lines, so you need to sort the lines first. After that we find the unique lines then sort again so the most occurring lines are on top.

sort file.txt | uniq -c | sort -nr > output.txt

Output is redirected into the file output.txt. If you just want to view results on the command line, remove the redirection and change the last command to sort -n so that the most common line will be at the bottom, i.e. definitely still on screen.

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3  
You can replace cat file.txt | sort with just sort file.txt. :) – mattdm♦ Mar 7 '11 at 21:21
@mattdm: thanks, updated! – DisgruntledGoat Mar 8 '11 at 21:56
@mattdm: the downside of that formulation is that you can't quickly replace the cat with something more interesting. Since, you know, there is no cat. – SamB Nov 18 '11 at 21:34

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