Re: efficient version of 'sort | uniq -c | sort -n'?

[Matthew Woehlke]

James Youngman wrote:
> On 5/21/07, Matthew Woehlke <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Is there an efficient implementation of 'sort | uniq -c | sort -n'? I
> > have a 4 GB core file I want to run 'strings' on, and the above is
> > really slow.
>
> I would suggest that the appropriate factorisation would be
>
> countitems | sort -n
>
> Here, countitems could be "sort" with some options or "uniq" with some
> options...

I thought about that, but /maximum/ efficiency is only achievable doing 
everything in one go. Anyway I think 'countitems' would still be a big 
improvement; I would do that as 'sort --unique-with-count' (preferably 
aliased 'sort -U') since IMO this is a missing feature of 'sort -u'.

--
Matthew
When in doubt, duct tape!