sort and uniq in pipelines in Bash Scripting - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Using sort and uniq in pipelines

📖 Scenario: You work in a small office where you receive a list of names with duplicates. You want to clean this list by sorting the names alphabetically and removing duplicates.

🎯 Goal: Build a bash script pipeline that sorts a list of names and removes duplicates using sort and uniq.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a file named names.txt with a list of names including duplicates

Use a variable to hold the filename

Use a pipeline with sort and uniq to process the file

Print the final sorted and unique list of names

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Cleaning and organizing lists of data like names, emails, or product IDs is common in office work and scripting tasks.

💼 Career

Knowing how to use pipelines with <code>sort</code> and <code>uniq</code> is a basic but essential skill for system administrators, data analysts, and anyone working with text data on the command line.

1

Create the names file

Create a file called names.txt with these exact names, each on its own line: Alice, Bob, Charlie, Alice, Bob, David

Bash Scripting

# Create the file names.txt with the given names
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo -e with newline characters \n and redirect output to names.txt.

2

Set the filename variable

Create a variable called filename and set it to the string names.txt

Bash Scripting

echo -e "Alice\nBob\nCharlie\nAlice\nBob\nDavid" > names.txt
# Create a variable filename with value 'names.txt'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use filename="names.txt" to assign the variable.

3

Sort and remove duplicates using a pipeline

Use a pipeline with sort and uniq commands to read from the file stored in filename and produce a sorted list without duplicates. Store the result in a variable called clean_names

Bash Scripting

echo -e "Alice\nBob\nCharlie\nAlice\nBob\nDavid" > names.txt
filename="names.txt"
# Use sort and uniq in a pipeline to read from $filename and save to clean_names
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use command substitution with $( ) to save the pipeline output to clean_names.

4

Print the cleaned list

Print the variable clean_names to display the sorted list of unique names

Bash Scripting

echo -e "Alice\nBob\nCharlie\nAlice\nBob\nDavid" > names.txt
filename="names.txt"
clean_names=$(sort "$filename" | uniq)
# Print the clean_names variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo "$clean_names" to print the variable preserving line breaks.