Hey my friend was asking me if i knew a way to cout how many different words in a file. I told him no not off hand, but i was thinking about it, and i started to wonder also. I imagine this is probably pretty simple im just missing something, I keep confusing my self with how you would compair and filter out the same words twice or more. If any one knows of a way to do this id like to know.....

thanks

may sound weird but give it a try,

1) get all the words in a single column. example say your file is

a b df sd ff d

make it
a
b
df
sd
ff
.
.


2) sort the output of step 1
3) use uniq command on the output of step2

oh i see, i didnt know about the uniq command, thanks a lot!

post back if you get something, would like to see if it really works out.
theoretically it should work fine

sort -u filename|wc

dont thinks this will work

Works on AIX / Solaris / HP & Redhat