sort | uniq existed before sort -u, and is compatible with a wider range of systems, although almost all modern systems do support -u -- it's POSIX. It's mostly a throwback to the days when sort -u didn't exist (and people don't tend to change their methods if the way that they know continues to work, just look at ifconfig vs. ip adoption). The two were likely merged because removing ...
The accepted answer is almost complete you might want to add an extra sort -nr at the end to sort the results with the lines that occur most often first uniq options: -c, --count prefix lines by the number of occurrences sort options: -n, --numeric-sort compare according to string numerical value -r, --reverse reverse the result of comparisons In the particular case were the lines you are ...
For one, sort would sort the list first; and second, uniq -u prints only those lines that are "unique" in each given run, the ones that don't have an identical input line before or after them.
Difference between sort -u and uniq -u - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange
The result that I need is to display all the lines from the original file removing all the duplicates (not just the consecutive ones), while maintaining the original order of statements in the file. Here, in this example, the result that I actually was looking for was aaaaaa cccccc bbbbbb How can I perform this generalized uniq operation in general?
How to get only the unique results without having to sort data?
Even though the word "uniq" appears in the title of this question, the OP is not asking for a return of rows based upon distinct values within column 1, but rather to remove ALL rows with duplicate values in column 1 (not de-duplication, but elimination). Above is a solution coded in Raku, a member of the Perl family of programming languages. :