Oh.  I've used that many times as well.   Like to make a Top Ten list of the most popular things:

something | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head

 

On 12/23/05, Luke-Jr <luke@dashjr.org> wrote:

On Friday 23 December 2005 15:23, Monty J. Harder wrote:
> On 12/22/05, Luke-Jr < luke@dashjr.org> wrote:
> > On Friday 23 December 2005 04:35, Jim Herrmann wrote:
> > > Thanks to Ron also.  This may be easier to remember since it uses more
> > > common commands.
> >
> > How is 'sort' and more common than 'uniq'? I really only use the two in
> > combination (uniq -c | sort -n) anyway...
>
> That's backwards.  You have to put the *sort* to the left of the *uniq* for
> it to work, because *uniq* requires that its input already be sorted.  The
> beauty of the Unix philosophy is that *uniq* doesn't have to know about
> sorting, because *sort* already does.

Not quite backwards, read it again-- you're right that it does require
presorted content, though.