Combiner et trier la sortie avec sort, uniq et cut

Filtering with grep and editing with sed/awk gets you far, but real pipelines often need to reorder, deduplicate, and slice columns of text.

• sort orders lines
• uniq collapses duplicates
• cut extracts fields

Together they turn raw streams into clean summaries.

sort reads lines and prints them in lexical order by default. It works great inside a pipe.

Use -n for numeric order and -r to reverse. Without -n, 10 sorts before 2.

-k picks the column to sort on and -t sets the delimiter. Here we sort a CSV by the second field numerically.

uniq only collapses adjacent duplicate lines, so you almost always sort first.

uniq -c prefixes each line with how many times it appeared. This is the classic frequency-count idiom.

Combine the tools to build a leaderboard: count, then sort the counts descending.

cut -d sets the delimiter and -f selects fields. Here we grab the username column from a colon-separated record.

cut -c selects character ranges instead of fields, useful for fixed-width data.

uniq -u prints lines that appear exactly once; uniq -d prints only those that repeat.

Put it all together: extract a field, sort it, count duplicates, and rank. This pattern answers questions like which IP hit us most?

Why must you usually run sort before uniq?

You can now reshape text streams end to end:

• sort (with -n, -r, -k, -t) orders lines
• uniq (with -c, -d, -u) deduplicates and counts
• cut (with -d/-f or -c) extracts fields

The cut | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr chain is one of the most useful one-liners in Linux.