4/16    Is there a version of sort that keeps only one copy of identical lines
        on the output, or some other cmd that does that?
        \_ uniq
        \_ sort -u  -- op after reading the man page for a 3rd time.
           \_ sort -u doesn't exist on all systems.  cat foo | sort | uniq
              should be universally portable among *nix systems.
              \_ so that's why I never knew about sort -u ... -uniq poster
                 \_ yep.  IIRC it was a linux introduced bastardization.  I
                    don't see why they needed to make sort do something that
                    another ancient program already existed for as if
                    eliminating "| uniq" was such a great time saver or
                    radical improvement to the core unix utilities. -tom
                        \_ sort -u is not a linux bastardization. It has
                           has been a standard option to sort since System V
                           and BSD4.1. Steve Bourne mentions it on pgs 193,
                           194, 196 and 266 (the sort(1) man page) in "The
                           UNIX System" (1983).
                    \_ that's easy to discount. both freebsd (e.g., soda) and
                       solaris offer a sort with -u option.
                    \- Which unix version doesnt do "sort -u"? I will bet
                       you this is not a "linux bastardization" ... by which
                       I assume you mean this is a GNU sort option.
                       re: "time saver" ... the time being saved isnt the
                       time to type "|uniq" but the run time. Have you
                       done any system programming? Why dont you time the
                       difference between the two on a large data file with
                       some repeats. Gee why does wc have the -l option?
                       That is so misleading. Is it so hard to do
                       grep -n ^ file | sed '$!d' | cut -f1 -d: ? --psb
                       \_ If I cared about runtimes I wouldn't be using the
                          default system utilities.  Yes, I meant GNU since
                          sort is obviously not part of the kernel, which we
                          both know.
                          \- What would you use if you cared about runtimes?
                             You can write a faster grep? GNU != linux so
                             calling it a linux bastardization is 1. stupid
                             2. wrong. --psb