How to get frequency counts of unique values in a list using UNIX?

Question

I have a file that has a couple thousand domain names in a list. I easily generated a list of just the unique names using the uniq command. Now, I want to go through and find how many times each of the items in the uniques list appears in the original, non-unique list. I thought this should be pretty easy to do with this loop, but I'm running into trouble:

for name in 'cat uniques.list'; do grep -c $name original.list; done > output.file

For some reason, it's spitting out a result that shows some count of something (honestly not sure what) for the uniques file and the original file.

I feel like I'm overlooking something really simple here. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

Why don't you simply sort original.list | uniq -c?

tripleee
– tripleee

2014-06-17 03:06:29 +00:00
Commented Jun 17, 2014 at 3:06 — tripleee
– tripleee, Commented Jun 17, 2014 at 3:06

quantdev · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-17 03:06:15Z

7

Simply use uniq -c on your file :

-c, --count prefix lines by the number of occurrences

The command to get the final output :

sort original.list | uniq -c

answered Jun 17, 2014 at 3:06

quantdev

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2 Comments

user3746901 Over a year ago

Actually this doesn't seem to work. I get counts, but still some names are listed multiple times with different counts, as if it didn't count every instance. Perhaps this is a product of the large file length?

quantdev Over a year ago

Are you sure there are no spaces in those ? (eg "abc " != "abc")

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