confusion about the description about huniq HOT 5 CLOSED

now I get it. a friend explained it to me.

huniq removes non-consecutive and consecutive duplicates without sorting the input, unlike uniq which can only remove consecutive duplicates and is therefore often combined with sort.

maybe this is a better explanation?

anyways, now I get it and thanks for creating and sharing this tool with the world. bye bye :-)

from huniq.

The uniq command only removes adjacent duplicates, hence sort | uniq is used as the usual pattern removing duplicates. The purpose of the sort step here is to get all duplicates to be next to each other.

This pattern can be replaced with huniq.

If sorting the data was intended instead of being a side effect of removing duplicates, sort still needs to be used.

from huniq.

The uniq command only removes adjacent duplicates, hence sort | uniq is used as the usual pattern removing duplicates. The purpose of the sort step here is to get all duplicates to be next to each other.

This pattern can be replaced with huniq.

If sorting the data was intended instead of being a side effect of removing duplicates, sort still needs to be used.

I totally understand that, but the text says that huniq is the tool that does not sort, and as you just described uniq is the tool that does not sort, so I guess it's a typo and you wanted to write uniq instead of huniq. Right?
Once again, the text says huniq does not sort, but you just described that huniq replaces sort | uniq and this is contradicting.

from huniq.

from huniq.

It would be helpful to quote the full text here ;)

huniq replaces sort | uniq (or sort -u with gnu sort) and huniq -c replaces sort | uniq -c, assuming the data is sorted just so it can be passed to uniq. If having sorted output is desired, sort | uniq should still be used.

It was indeed the case that yesterday the clause saying "assuming the data is sorted just so it can be passed to uniq" was not present. I added this clause as extra clarification. This was already heavily implied by the presence of the specification pertaining to the stability of output order, but now it's explicit. Thank you for pointing this out.

from huniq.