Last week Lincoln introduced us to the Command Line; that mysterious place where hackers of the more nefarious kind are usually depicted tearing down the protective walls of the intertubes. As I hope will become clear in this series, which also includes my posting on the sort command last week, anyone who works a lot with files and text have a great deal to gain from building up their command line toolbox. Today we will look at the uniq command (for Linux or Mac OS X users), which can count and remove duplicate lines from a text file.

Consider this real, if dark, example: Sitting in the provincial archives in Shandong province, China reading through a pile of Communist Party Traitor Elimination Bureau reports from the 1940s, I started to keep track of the many different kinds of crimes the cadres were listing their suspects under. Running dogs of Japanese imperalism, Trotskyites,…

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