Geek wins !
That is precisely what my fifth slide on
https://dcc.ufmg.br/~lcerf/slides/mda3.pdf says. :-)
The half day spent mechanically processing the large file was more than
enough to read those slides, practice with the related exercises (the data
are still online, together with the solutions) and, in the end (on slide 20),
know about 'uniq', among many other simple text-processing commands. The
subsequent slides on https://dcc.ufmg.br/~lcerf/pt/mda.html#slides up to "A
few words about efficiency", are about 'grep' (and regular expressions),
'sed' (almost only the substitution command, actually), awk (far more
in-depth: awk is great!) and, well, "A few words about efficiency".
I assume the student knows how the fundamentals of the interactive use of the
Shell. If it is not your case, then read, before any of the above slides,
http://en.flossmanuals.net/command-line/ :
The whole "Basics" section";
The subsections "Basic commands", "Cut down on typing" and "Redirection" of
the "Commands" section;
The subsection "Piping" of the" "Advanced-ish" section.
