Bash Cookbook

Calculating statistics and reducing duplicates based on file contents

At first glance, calculating statistics based on the contents of a file might not be among the most interesting tasks one could accomplish with Bash scripting, however, it can be useful in several circumstances. Let's imagine that our program takes user input from several commands. We could calculate the length of the input to determine if it is too little or too much. Alternatively, we could also determine the size of a string to determine buffer sizes for a program written in another programming language (such as C/C++):

$ wc -c <<< "1234567890"11 # Note there are 10 chars + a new line or carriage return \n$ echo -n "1234567890" | wc -c10

We can use commands like wc