Sort Uniq Count

sort-uniq-count

Shell pipeline wrapper that removes blank lines, sorts the stream, groups identical lines case-insensitively with uniq -i -c, and rewrites the result as tab-delimited count<TAB>value.

Quick Start

• Command: ... | sort-uniq-count [bfinrs]
• Local executable: /home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/sort-uniq-count
• Default sort flag bundle: f

When To Use This Tool

• Counting repeated nonblank lines without manually composing sort | uniq -c | awk
• Performing case-insensitive frequency summaries on text streams
• Applying a small subset of GNU sort flags before counting
• Producing tab-delimited count tables for later ranking or filtering

Common Patterns

# Default case-insensitive counting
printf 'beta\nAlpha\nalpha\nbeta\n' | sort-uniq-count

# Numeric pre-sort before counting
printf '10\n2\n2\n' | sort-uniq-count n

# Reverse sort before counting
cat values.txt | sort-uniq-count r

Recommended Workflow

1. Feed the wrapper a one-item-per-line text stream.
2. Pass only the compact flag letters it understands (bfinrs) when you need to alter the internal sort.
3. Capture the resulting count<TAB>value table or pipe it into sort-uniq-count-rank.
4. Treat the output as case-insensitive counts unless you have inspected the shell pipeline and intentionally changed it.

Guardrails

• The wrapper sorts internally, so the input does not need to be pre-sorted; the old “sorted input required” assumption is wrong.
• Counting is case-insensitive because the pipeline always uses uniq -i -c, and the default sort mode is -f.
• It does not implement real help/version flags. For example, --version was mangled into sort-option letters and locally failed with sort: options '-in' are incompatible.
• Unrecognized user arguments are stripped down to the subset [bfinrs]; if none survive, the wrapper falls back to s rather than erroring cleanly.
• In local testing, printf 'beta\nAlpha\nalpha\nbeta\n' | sort-uniq-count produced two rows: 2\tAlpha and 2\tbeta.