number of different lines in a file

[Paddy]

Hi Kaz,
The 'Unix way' is to have lots of small utilities that do one thing
well, then connect them via pipes. It could be that the optimised sort
algorithm is hampered if it has to remove duplicates too, or that the
maintainers want to draw a line on added functionality.

Personally, 95%* of the time that I want to use uniq, I also want to
sort any input.  and  70% of the time, I also want to do 'wc -l' on the
uniq lines found. Sort, on the other hand, I regularly use without
uniq. Should I therefore want uniq to have a sort and wc functionality
added?
Not for me thanks. I like pipes. I agree with the targetted
funtionality of the 'core' utilities like sort, and search for other
solutions e.g. scripting when life gets more complex.

- Pad.

Unix pipes. You too can do parallel processing on that quad opteron
server :-)

* All peacentages shown is accrutt