5 ms·

What's the rationale for piping sort into wc?

• iigs 17y ago
  That looks like it was a sample line that wasn't particularly useful, but if you do: cat file.txt | sort | uniq | wc -l ## notice uniq it gives you the count of unique lines. If you omit the sort in that instance it will fold duplicates together a/b/a is three lines, not two.
  • gnosis 17y ago
    Instead of "sort | uniq" you could just use "sort -u"