Find duplicate lines in a file and count how many time each line was duplicated?

Assuming there is one number per line:

sort <file> | uniq -c

You can use the more verbose --count flag too with the GNU version, e.g., on Linux:

sort <file> | uniq --count

To find and count duplicate lines in multiple files, you can try the following command:

sort <files> | uniq -c | sort -nr

or:

cat <files> | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

Via awk:

awk '{dups[$1]++} END{for (num in dups) {print num,dups[num]}}' data

In awk 'dups[$1]++' command, the variable $1 holds the entire contents of column1 and square brackets are array access. So, for each 1st column of line in data file, the node of the array named dups is incremented.

And at the end, we are looping over dups array with num as variable and print the saved numbers first then their number of duplicated value by dups[num].

Note that your input file has spaces on end of some lines, if you clear up those, you can use $0 in place of $1 in command above :)

This will print duplicate lines only, with counts:

sort FILE | uniq -cd

or, with GNU long options (on Linux):

sort FILE | uniq --count --repeated

on BSD and OSX you have to use grep to filter out unique lines:

sort FILE | uniq -c | grep -v '^ *1 '

For the given example, the result would be:

  3 123
  2 234

---

If you want to print counts for all lines including those that appear only once:

sort FILE | uniq -c

or, with GNU long options (on Linux):

sort FILE | uniq --count

For the given input, the output is:

  3 123
  2 234
  1 345

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In order to sort the output with the most frequent lines on top, you can do the following (to get all results):

sort FILE | uniq -c | sort -nr

or, to get only duplicate lines, most frequent first:

sort FILE | uniq -cd | sort -nr

on OSX and BSD the final one becomes:

sort FILE | uniq -c | grep -v '^ *1 ' | sort -nr