Uniq Explained

uniq
Author:Ken Thompson
(AT&T Bell Laboratories)
Developer:Various open-source and commercial developers
Programming Language:C
Operating System:Unix, Unix-like, Plan 9, Inferno, MSX-DOS, IBM i
Platform:Cross-platform
Genre:Command
License:coreutils

GPLv3+
Plan 9: MIT License

'''uniq''' is a utility command on Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and Unix-like operating systems which, when fed a text file or standard input, outputs the text with adjacent identical lines collapsed to one, unique line of text.

Overview

The command is a kind of filter program. Typically it is used after sort. It can also output only the duplicate lines (with the -d option), or add the number of occurrences of each line (with the -c option). For example, the following command lists the unique lines in a file, sorted by the number of times each occurs:

$ sort file | uniq -c | sort -n

Using uniq like this is common when building pipelines in shell scripts.

History

First appearing in Version 3 Unix,[1] uniq is now available for a number of different Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is part of the X/Open Portability Guide since issue 2 of 1987. It was inherited into the first version of POSIX and the Single Unix Specification.

The version bundled in GNU coreutils was written by Richard Stallman and David MacKenzie.

A uniq command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2.[2]

The command is available as a separate package for Microsoft Windows as part of the GnuWin32 project[3] and the UnxUtils collection of native Win32 ports of common GNU Unix-like utilities.[4]

The command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system.[5]

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. M. D. . McIlroy . Doug McIlroy . 1987 . A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 . CSTR . 139 . Bell Labs.
  2. https://archive.org/details/MSXDOS2TOOLS MSX-DOS2 Tools User's Manual by ASCII Corporation
  3. http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm CoreUtils for Windows
  4. http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ Native Win32 ports of some GNU utilities
  5. Web site: IBM System i Version 7.2 Programming Qshell . en . IBM . . IBM . 2020-09-05 .