UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I have a fixed width file in the following format

Sr.No A.No Name
1 2 PPP
3 4 PPP
5 6 TTT
7 8 OOO
9 10 OOO
11 12 OOO

The 3rd column starts at position 10 and ends at 15. I want to count the number of occurances of each Name and output to a file
Example in the above case , the output should be
PPP 2
TTT 1
OOO 3

Please advise

Thanks

Code:

cut -c 10-15 file | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn >newfile

The pipe to sort | uniq -c | sort -rn is a standard idiom for counting things. The final sort puts the occurrence counts in rank order; you can take that out if you want them sorted alphabetically (which is what the first sort does, not because it's neat, but because uniq needs identical lines to be adjacent, and sorting them is a good way to do that).

Next week, the spelling bee will include "occurrence".

Thanks , that worked perfectly as required.