I haven't seen this for a while, so I'll throw this one out that I had to use yesterday:
sort lets say you've got a file that contains a list of servers, which were added to the file because of x event: lauas...@angel(~)$ more somefile web3 web1 web3 web2 web2 web1 web2 So now you want to un-clutter the file and put each server together. This is where sort comes in: lauas...@angel(~)$ sort somefile web1 web1 web2 web2 web2 web3 web3 Now they're all together. Of course, maybe you don't need multiple entries for each server. Maybe you only need to know IF a certain event happened on a server. There's a command that works well with sort: uniq uniq will show you only one copy of any line repeated in a file: lauas...@angel(~)$ sort somefile|uniq web1 web2 web3 Of course, you might also want to know how many times this event happened with each server, but be too lazy (or too blind) to count the lines in the file. So uniq has a nice option, -c which tells you how many times a line was repeated in a file: lauas...@angel(~)$ sort somefile|uniq -c 2 web1 3 web2 2 web3 Now, there's always the outside chance you want to know which servers the event happened on most. The answer is obvious - pipe it through sort again! lauas...@angel(~)$ sort somefile|uniq -c|sort 2 web1 2 web3 3 web2 So there you are. Obviously this becomes more and more handy as you progress upwards in the number of lines in somefile (some number of thousands, I was dealing with!) but I loaded up on the job and took care of what I was told was an impossible task, and handled it in record time, thanks to these two commands, which also helped me prove something in addition to providing some valuable information, something it pays to remember every day: The people who have been designing and using Unix since it's inception are smart/lazy enough to have wanted to do many of the things we occasionally run in to that seem like tedious tasks. They have designed the tools to make doing these things easy. Knowing these tools exist can make your life easier, and get you to the bar faster. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
