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

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.