Text Utilities: wc, sort, uniq, and cut

Each Linux text utility does one small job, but pipelines turn them into powerful workflows. They read ordinary text and write to standard output, which makes them ideal for logs, lists, and delimiter-separated data.

Count with wc

wc file.txt prints line, word, and byte counts. Use wc -l, wc -w, or wc -c when you need only one result. For example, wc -l access.log quickly counts log records.

Order with sort

sort names.txt orders lines lexically. -n compares numeric values so 10 does not come before 2, while -r reverses the order. Combine them as sort -nr scores.txt to sort numbers from largest to smallest.

wccount lines, words, bytes

sortsort text or numbers

uniqprocess adjacent duplicates

cutextract fields or characters

Handle duplicates with uniq

uniq compares adjacent lines only, so input is usually sorted first: sort names.txt | uniq. uniq -c prefixes every unique value with its frequency. Without sorting, duplicates separated elsewhere in the file are not combined.

Extract fields with cut

For colon-delimited data, cut -d ":" -f 1 /etc/passwd extracts the first field. -d sets the delimiter and -f selects fields; -f 1,3 selects more than one.

Complete pipeline: cut -d ":" -f 2 users.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr extracts the second field, counts each value, then ranks frequencies from highest to lowest.