Select unique or distinct values from a list in UNIX shell script

Solution 1:

You might want to look at the uniq and sort applications.

./yourscript.ksh | sort | uniq

(FYI, yes, the sort is necessary in this command line, uniq only strips duplicate lines that are immediately after each other)

EDIT:

Contrary to what has been posted by Aaron Digulla in relation to uniq's commandline options:

Given the following input:

class
jar
jar
jar
bin
bin
java

uniq will output all lines exactly once:

class
jar
bin
java

uniq -d will output all lines that appear more than once, and it will print them once:

jar
bin

uniq -u will output all lines that appear exactly once, and it will print them once:

class
java

./script.sh | sort -u

This is the same as monoxide's answer, but a bit more concise.

With zsh you can do this:

% cat infile 
tar
more than one word
gz
java
gz
java
tar
class
class
zsh-5.0.0[t]% print -l "${(fu)$(<infile)}"
tar
more than one word
gz
java
class

Or you can use AWK:

% awk '!_[$0]++' infile    
tar
more than one word
gz
java
class

For larger data sets where sorting may not be desirable, you can also use the following perl script:

./yourscript.ksh | perl -ne 'if (!defined $x{$_}) { print $_; $x{$_} = 1; }'

This basically just remembers every line output so that it doesn't output it again.

It has the advantage over the "sort | uniq" solution in that there's no sorting required up front.