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uniq

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This article is about the Unix utility. For other uses, see Uniq (disambiguation).


uniq
Original author(s)Ken Thompson
Developer(s)AT&T Bell Laboratories
Initial releaseFebruary 1973; 51 years ago (1973-02)
Operating systemUnix and Unix-like, MSX-DOS
TypeCommand
LicenseGNU GPL v3
Websiteman7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/uniq.1.html

uniq is a Unix utility which, when fed a text file or STDIN, 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).

An example: To see the list of 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] it is now available for a number of different Unix and Unix-like operating systems

The version of uniq bundled in GNU coreutils was written by Richard Stallman and David MacKenzie.[2]

A uniq command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2.[3]

See also

References

  1. ^ McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139.
  2. ^ https://linux.die.net/man/1/uniq
  3. ^ MSX-DOS2 Tools User's Manual by ASCII Corporation
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