Find unique lines

How can I find the unique lines and remove all duplicates from a file? My input file is

I would like the result to be:

2
3

sort file | uniq will not do the job. Will show all values 1 time

Solution 1:

uniq has the option you need:

   -u, --unique
          only print unique lines

$ cat file.txt
1
1
2
3
5
5
7
7
$ uniq -u file.txt
2
3

Solution 2:

Use as follows:

sort < filea | uniq > fileb

Solution 3:

You could also print out the unique value in "file" using the cat command by piping to sort and uniq

cat file | sort | uniq -u

Solution 4:

While sort takes O(n log(n)) time, I prefer using

awk '!seen[$0]++'

awk '!seen[$0]++' is an abbreviation for awk '!seen[$0]++ {print}', print line(=$0) if seen[$0] is not zero. It take more space but only O(n) time.

Solution 5:

uniq -u has been driving me crazy because it did not work.

So instead of that, if you have python (most Linux distros and servers already have it):

Assuming you have the data file in notUnique.txt

#Python
#Assuming file has data on different lines
#Otherwise fix split() accordingly.

uniqueData = []
fileData = open('notUnique.txt').read().split('\n')

for i in fileData:
  if i.strip()!='':
    uniqueData.append(i)

print uniqueData

###Another option (less keystrokes):
set(open('notUnique.txt').read().split('\n'))

Note that due to empty lines, the final set may contain '' or only-space strings. You can remove that later. Or just get away with copying from the terminal ;)

Just FYI, From the uniq Man page:

"Note: 'uniq' does not detect repeated lines unless they are adjacent. You may want to sort the input first, or use 'sort -u' without 'uniq'. Also, comparisons honor the rules specified by 'LC_COLLATE'."

One of the correct ways, to invoke with: # sort nonUnique.txt | uniq

Example run:

$ cat x
3
1
2
2
2
3
1
3

$ uniq x
3
1
2
3
1
3

$ uniq -u x
3
1
3
1
3

$ sort x | uniq
1
2
3